One Step At A Time

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...

Last Sunday was our 3rd class in Financial Peace University, and we talked about the the dreaded B-word, Budget. Since I read Total Money Makeover months ago, we have been doing the budget and have posted several times about it. Therefore, I am not going to go over every detail of this past Sunday's class, but will discuss some of the issues I have with budgeting so far. I believe if I keep honestly critiquing us and our money management, it will help us in the long run to win with money. Having a lot of money is not the desired result of this process, the results we are looking for are Financial Peace, retire with dignity, and pursue some of our dreams later in life. Below are just some of the things and habits that gets in our way of achieving our goals. One of the things that I do that absolutely does not work is create the budget and never look at it again. I work hard to make a zero based budget and making sure every dollar has a name, but never pull out the game plan to m...

It has been a tough week for us and I don't think we are out of the woods yet. We spent every day this week except for Tuesday at the hospital with my daughter and I have been out of work the whole time as result. Finally we are home and she seems to be doing better but we are still waiting for some test results. We are praying that she is better and that the test will come back negative. We are also thankful for all the thoughts, prayers, and encouraging words our family and friends sent our way. As a result of being out of work for the whole week, I will not be getting paid for it. Unfortunately, I do not have any more sick time to use at work and we will have to be careful with every penny from now on. We pray this will be a small setback that we can recover from quickly. Knowing a storm is coming and not being fully prepared is a little scary. It has made us realize how important it is to get our finances in order as fast as we can. If we had a fully funded emergency f...