One Step At A Time

Wow! It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog. The last post was September 2009 and that is about the time we fell off the wagon. To make a long story short, in December 2009 my daughter had surgery and had a weeklong stay in the hospital and needed another week of attention at home. This caused added expenses and loss of pay. Instead of staying on track and rebuilding our emergency fund, we just let things fall to the side. When I was blogging about our situation, I had gazelle intensity and my hope is to start blogging again to get it back. So after two years of hiatus, we are back to square one. We need to complete the Baby Step 1 again, ($1,000 Emergency Fund).

Since we have started on the Debt Snowball, we have started to receive calls from debt collectors and one in particular has not been pleasant. Her name is Ms. Brown and she keeps calling about Felicia's court reporting bill. A little background on this bill: Felicia was going to CRID, the Court Reporting Institute, and she decided to leave early because she was in her last trimester of pregnancy and it was difficult to get around with her steno machine. Before the quarter started she told them that she was taking a leave of absence and would return after the baby was born, but they talked her into signing up for the quarter and told her it would be okay if she did not finish the quarter. It turns out they wanted her to attend until her student loan paid them and then allow her to drop, but the student loan did not pay them and now they want to collect from Felicia. Ms. Brown called Felicia one day and started to tell Felicia that she was in "breach of contract" and needed

Lately, we have had some weird things happen at the house that has caused us to get a little off track with the budget. In spite of these things, we have not touched our emergency fund and have just found other ways around these emergencies. Our dryer and our stove are busted. We are renting and the land lord had us call a appliance warranty company but for both appliances they claim are unfix-able and not under warranty. We are waiting to hear back from the land lords to see what they want to do about it, but nothing yet. The dryer is a simpler problem to work around because we can take the clothes to our parents house and wash them while we visit, Felicia's mom will sometimes take a couple of loads and do them herself for us, or we can go to the laundry mat. The stove on the other hand is little more difficult especially since we don't like to cook anyway and now we have to learn to bake instead of cooking Hamburger Helper. I am kidding but when we cook it is pretty bas

We have had to add a few more things to the debt snowball. The new Total Debt amount is $21,625.22 so that leaves the Total Remaining at $20,637.89. Three debts got added to the snowball, and two of them we knew were coming and we were just waiting on the final tally to come in. See back in May, our daughter got sick and she had to spend 3 days in the hospital and she had to have a procedure done. After the insurance paid their part there was $1,403.00 left to pay. Thank God for insurance! The third bill is one we forgot about. Felicia was attending a court reporting school here in Dallas that we were paying for on credit (student loans). The last quarter she attended she dropped early because she was in her 3rd trimester of pregnancy and it was hard for her to maneuver with her steno machine. As a result of dropping early, the student loan did not pay for the classes and the school is now charging her for it ($1,508.00). It looks like if we pay the minimums we can have our deb

We are officially working on paying off our debt!!! We started this financial journey with $18,714.22 in debt and paying some of the minimum payments while working on the $1,000.00 emergency fund, we have paid $987.33 of it. Now, we have a total of $17,726.89 to payoff and by using the Debt Snowball and calculating only paying the minimum payment we will be debt free September 2014. Wow, that is 5 years from now! Felicia and I are committed to throwing whatever extra money comes in at our Debt. Throughout the year we do get extra money that we could use like my bonuses, my overtime, Felicia's sock monkey sales, and when we save money shopping. I know we can we get this done before September 2014. To keep track of our progress, I have added a Debt Snowball Tracker on the Top Right of this blog. What kind of debt do we have that adds up to $18,714.22? Looking at everything I put into the Debt Snowball it looks like $192 is from a checking account that went in the

WE DID IT!!!! We have finished Baby Step 1!!! We have a $1000.00 Emergency Fund!!!! Right now, it feels good to have $1,000.00 in savings. Checking off this step has encouraged us to keep going and we are ready to tackle Step 2, which is to pay off our debt using the Debt Snowball. Felicia and I worked hard to accomplish this. We had to hold each other accountable to sticking to the budget we both agreed to. It is not easy, especially when you get invited to parties, dinners, and going out with friends, but we are doing good saying no when the money isn't there. Living on the envelope system is not as bad as I thought it was going to be. If the cash is there, we use it and if it is not, we don't spend it. We are working on taking this momentum and applying it to our debt snowball. Because we budget and stick to it, we knew what day we were hitting this goal and budgeted some celebration money. Felicia and I got her parents to watch the kids while we went to dinner at L