Where to start......hmmmm.not really sure about these blog things but I thought it might be an interesting way to keep track of our journey and how far we've come along the way. Three Christmases ago, my mother-in-law let us borrow a book from a guy named Dave Ramsey. I had never heard of him before but I love to read so , sure, why not. It was called The Total Money Makeover.Before the bok, I didn't realize what a problem we had. You see, our family, like many American families, have been sold on the fact that credit is good and debt is just a way of life. That you can't have a good life without going into debt. Well, we are tired of being sick and tired, living paycheck to paycheck, and working hard just to see our paychecks spent before we even get it. At that time we were drowning in debt, especially medical. I'm not sure of the exact numbers. But not including the house I'm pretty sure we were close to the $85000. I couldn't believe it. Surely we couldn't be that much in debt. The sad part is we didn't have much to show for it either. It mainly consisted of medical, car loans, student loans from my husband, and some minimal consumer credit card debt. So we started following the plan and I worked a second job one night a week. We were making good progress. But then the housing market started to fall, and we were worried that if we didn't sell our house then, that we might not be able to sell it later. We were wanting to move out of that neighborhood, now that we had children. So we ended up selling that one and buying another one in a different neighborhood, and have been blessed with great neighbors, being closer to an awesome church, and getting our girls into an aawesome school. But with that we also went back into debt or home repairs for the windows to be replaced and for the kids bathroom to be repaired(not completely remodeled yet, just the bathtub area was done). So right now, not including medical bills that have still to be paid, and some old "sleeping" debt(which we will get to after we are done with this) we are sitting at about $42,000 in debt not including the house. So now we are getting serious about this again and are starting our Total Money Makeover journey again. The breakdown in this:
Roofing Company(our deductible that we still owe from when we had to repair the roof this summer)- $680
Bathroom- $2,925
Windows- $3380
Melissa's Student Loan- $9456
Tuscon(our SUV)- $11,846
Tim's Student Loan- $12,890
If you are not familiar with Dave Ramsey's plan, he uses Baby Steps to become debt free and to build wealth. I'll share them exactly in another post sometime. But for right now. Baby step one is where we ar at. Baby Step 1 is to save a $1000 baby emergency Fund. This helps you not go back into debt by covering those small emergencies that can be budget busters while you are working on getting out of debt. Right now we have half of our BEF due to the family being sick for the past sick weeks, and having doctors visits and meds to fill that were not budgetted.
Well, thats it for now, I'll be trying to post pictures and play around with this soem over the next few days. Hope you enjoy following the sotry of our journey through this and I also hope that you might be inspired to start the journey for your own family and to change your family tree as Dave says.
