Winter in Michigan

Random pictures

Financial Peace University

Dan and I started Financial Peace University (FPU) a couple of weeks ago. The premise for the class is to get out of Debt by 'living like no one else today so that we can live like no one else later" The class was designed by Dave Ramsey and we are taking the class through our church. It is a 13 week class that teaches us how to control our money so our money doesn't control us anymore. The class starts by putting together an emergency fund of $1000. We were very fortunate that Dan had just worked a boat load of overtime and we were able to fund it very quickly. After the first step it was time to start paying of debt, but we had to start by putting together a budget, which we kind of had one from several years ago. I put in our current paychecks and updated it a little bit. The next step was to get both Dan and I on board with the budget which meant that Dan had to have input on the budget or cash flow plan as it is called at this point in the class :) We did that and Dan had some good input...but we still didn't know how to put the cash flow plan into practice. The following week was the best for me. It provided the forms that allowed us to figure out how much we had to spend each week so that we could go to an all cash system. this was the difficult part for me in the past that I could never get a handle on.

So we started the cash only system last week. And right away we were faced with a decision about whether to spend money that wasn't in an envelope or not. We were in Target and the new movie "Madagascar 2" came out. Now in the past I would just buy the new movie that I wanted regardless of whether the money was there for stuff like that or not. I was so torn, I was even going to borrow from my spending money for the following week to buy it, but after some deliberation, I made the decision that we did not need that movie and that we could rent it through Netflix to watch it. Three days later we got a package in the mail from Dan's mom for Josiah. It was a Valentine package and guess what was inside...yep, Madagascar 2. I could hardly believe it.

That same day that we were faced with buying the movie we decided we wanted to buy a 3rd controller for the Wii. Josiah has turned out to be catching onto the games very quickly and with a 3rd remote we can all play as a family. But once again we were just starting the FPU program and we didn't have any money to go buy the controller. So we figured out how we could pay for it. We decided to sell back a couple of games that we never played anyway and then Dan suggested we take back bottles. So together as a family we gathered up all the bottles in the house and we were off. We had enough money to buy the controller plus Valentines cards for Josiah to take to daycare. And the best part, we felt accomplished that we didn't just go buy the controller because we wanted it, not caring where the money came from.

This past week we learned about something called a debt snowball. It makes so much sense that I am not sure why everyone doesn't do this. The whole idea is that you pay minimum payments on all of your debts. Once you pay off your smallest day you role that minimum payment into the next biggest debt. So if you were paying $50 on a $100 debt, once that debt was paid off you add $50 to your next biggest debt. And you keep doing that until all of your debt is paid off. At any rate, we were able to put our debt information into a calculator and if we stay on course we can have all of our debt paid off (besides our house) in less than 3 years. Most of our debts wouldn't come due for 7-10 years. So we are pretty excited about this. We know that life happens, but we are determined to get out of as much debt as we can in as short of time as possible.

We have a great support system at our church, yet one more reason that we are loving our new church. I hope to come to you all with good news to our debt pay off.

Josiah learns his ABC's

The first part of this video is of him laughing, eating and trying to sing all at the same time. Once he stops laughing, swallows what he was eating and then tries to sing, it is much better. But the whole video is cute and funny regardless of the food ;) So enjoy all you grandparents who haven't seen him in a little bit, this kid is growing right up!!!