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).

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...

On June 28th, we had our 4th class of FPU and it was all about DEBT. I think this is the part that drives people to look into Dave, they hear bits and pieces about his program and getting out of debt, but when they hear him talk about never BORROWING money again they are quickly turned off. For Felicia and me, we liked that part. This lesson is about how to get out of debt, taking an honest look at what it cost to finance things you could save up for, and what you could do if you had no debt. How to get out of debt? Listening to Dave on the radio , I know that when I hear a new caller talks to Dave the first things he will tell them is to get on written cash plan, stop borrowing money, start saving money, and work the debt snowball. I know what you are thinking, "you need to listen to a radio show to know that." Well, sometimes you do. Sometimes you need a stranger to knock some sense into you! If it was that easy to do, we already be doing it. It would not take an ...

I have not posted anything in awhile and so I am going to try and catch up on everything that has gone on. Starting To Turn It Around I feel like we are starting to turn our downward spiral around. The week before our son's birthday party we spent way too much money and still had to pay for a party. Initially, we had planned a low budget party and we kept to that game plan. I thought it came out nice and Anthony had a good time. I think Felicia has the gazelle intensity now because she got after me the other day. On my late day for work, I thought I did not have time to make my lunch so I decided to buy lunch and when Felicia found out she nearly hit the roof. She looked at me and reminded me of the sacrifices we need to make now to get where we want to be. At first I was offended, who is she to be getting after me for buying lunch? Later in the day, she looked at the bank account online and discovered that I also bought breakfast instead of making it because I thought I di...