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Thursday, January 19, 2012

We're Debt Free!

This actually happened in April of 2011.  I'm not sure why it got saved as a draft in my blog instead of a post. I know it was a post before.  For those who have not read our story before, here it is.



I remember when my parents got out of debt. I was about six or seven years old, and they never looked back. They used only the money they had from that day on. Fast forward many years, and I was debt free too. I even graduated from college with money in my pocket to help me get started in life. For some reason though, I took a credit card just in case of emergencies.

A couple of years later I got married and stayed at home. Staying home took a lot of sacrifice on our part that most people would not even consider taking on, but we thought that our kids were worth the sacrifice. The only problem was that we burned through our savings and began using the credit card to make ends meet. (If only we had known then what we later learned...like not having so much taken out of my husband's check for taxes so we could make ends meet every month.) Every year with our huge tax refund we would pay off our debts and start the whole cycle again. A couple of years ago, I got really tired of this cycle and began praying that God would change things. I was really irritated with my husband for what I thought was irresponsible spending. The funny thing was that when God answered my prayer, I realized that I was just as much a contributor to our financial tightness as my husband was.
One day my husband came home talking about a new guy named Dave Ramsey coming on the local talk radio station. After a couple of months of listening to him, we began working on our baby steps, and my husband decided to order Financial Peace University. Because of the price, I was hesitant about ordering the class, but didn't voice my concerns because I was excited about my husband being excited about learning how to manage our finances. I'm so glad I didn't say anything in opposition to him. The class helped clarify questions that we had about the baby steps. Twenty-two months after we began the class, we have paid off $30,ooo--mostly vehicle loan debt. (During this time, the Lord gave my husband a pay raise, and provided a couple of at home jobs for me.)
I didn't realize how much it meant to our kids until we went to make our last payment on our vehicle. As the payment was going up in tube of the drive through line, my husband and I heard a spontaneous chant from the back. "We're debt free. We're debt free."

Not only are we debt free, but we plan to stay that way this time. Financial Peace University taught us how to do that. We learned how to start off with a baby emergency fund to keep us from having to crack out a credit card for emergencies. We also now know to save up for a 3-6 month emergency fund now that we are debt free. Not only that, but we have also learned how to prepare for the future and have a plan for our money instead of our money having a plan for us. Oh, let's not forget the budget and learning how to work together as a team was also something else we learned. We are now on baby step three and looking forward to getting a larger house for our family of six.

As a side note, the first baby step is $500 for people who have an income of $25,000 or less. Also, much of the same information used in Financial Peace University can be found in the book, The Total Money Makeover (also available at most public libraries.)

Monday, January 02, 2012

Our New Year

They say how you start the new year is how you will spend the year.  I surely hope not!  We went to bed early New Year's Eve and couldn't go to sleep....not good.  We woke up running late for church the New Year's Day...not good.  Our son put on a pair of pants two sizes too small on him, and one of our daughters could not find shoes that fit her...not good.
We finally made it to church about five minutes before it was supposed to start....not bad unless you are the pianist and song leader.  We stepped in the church building only to realize that our son's pants that he had changed into were one size too small...not as bad as the first pair.  They had looked better in incandescent lighting than they did in fluorescent lighting. I got up to the piano and was playing away before the official start of services when our two youngest daughters came up to me.  The very youngest had tears right under her eyes, and the next to youngest informed me that we had locked them in the vehicle....not good.   Evidently my husband, oldest two children, and I had jumped out of our vehicle and hastily headed for the church building.  My husband locked the doors with the remote without ever looking back.  The two younger girls said that they unlocked the doors, and the alarm went off, but they locked the door back after they got out.  Poor babies.  Good thing our church is small, and the parking lot is too.

On the bright side, we all stayed up late that night, having a great time watching Roy Rogers movies.

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