Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Debt Free
In January of 2006 I had whined my way into another trip to Phoenix for Royals
spring training. The thing is I didn’t have the money to go, so I charged the trip. Then in February I grabbed Financial Peace and started reading. I also picked up a XM radio and started listening to Dave in the afternoons. It didn’t take long to discover that I was wrong, as Dave would say my plan wasn’t working. I decided that we should start the baby steps. I still had the trip and one more thing to charge, the rental car. Once the trip was over we went about working together to get out of debt.
When we totaled the debt, not including the house, it totaled almost $37,000! This was crazy! I started to wonder if we could do this, pay down our debt and not charge more. We started simple, putting every thing we could to the snowball. A couple of months into the process we picked up The Total Money Makeover. We discovered that we needed to do a monthly budget every month. Once we really got rolling, we were blessed with more money. We handled that money the best way possible, pay down the snowball! By October of 06 we had paid off a car, profit sharing loan and three credit cards! We had paid off half of our debt in 6 months!
At this point we had Christmas coming so we saved for presents. In January we decided to save for two upcoming events, our daughter’s high school graduation and first year of college. We had always wanted to pay for our children’s college. As a fan of Dave we knew that we couldn’t get any loans for her school. Again we were blessed with more money, which we saved.
In August we had saved up 3 – 6 months of expenses, and were in position to cash flow college. We were in good shape for getting the last debt paid off by July of 08. Once again we were blessed with more money, guess what we could do? March of 2008 we paid off the HELOC! We are now debt free!
Notice the difference between the I in the beginning and we after starting working together. It has been a great journey, together. We are closer than ever before!
In February of this year my wife got sick. Knowing that we are financially stable we were able to focus on getting her well, not how can we afford this. This has been a life changing journey!
spring training. The thing is I didn’t have the money to go, so I charged the trip. Then in February I grabbed Financial Peace and started reading. I also picked up a XM radio and started listening to Dave in the afternoons. It didn’t take long to discover that I was wrong, as Dave would say my plan wasn’t working. I decided that we should start the baby steps. I still had the trip and one more thing to charge, the rental car. Once the trip was over we went about working together to get out of debt.
When we totaled the debt, not including the house, it totaled almost $37,000! This was crazy! I started to wonder if we could do this, pay down our debt and not charge more. We started simple, putting every thing we could to the snowball. A couple of months into the process we picked up The Total Money Makeover. We discovered that we needed to do a monthly budget every month. Once we really got rolling, we were blessed with more money. We handled that money the best way possible, pay down the snowball! By October of 06 we had paid off a car, profit sharing loan and three credit cards! We had paid off half of our debt in 6 months!
At this point we had Christmas coming so we saved for presents. In January we decided to save for two upcoming events, our daughter’s high school graduation and first year of college. We had always wanted to pay for our children’s college. As a fan of Dave we knew that we couldn’t get any loans for her school. Again we were blessed with more money, which we saved.
In August we had saved up 3 – 6 months of expenses, and were in position to cash flow college. We were in good shape for getting the last debt paid off by July of 08. Once again we were blessed with more money, guess what we could do? March of 2008 we paid off the HELOC! We are now debt free!
Notice the difference between the I in the beginning and we after starting working together. It has been a great journey, together. We are closer than ever before!
In February of this year my wife got sick. Knowing that we are financially stable we were able to focus on getting her well, not how can we afford this. This has been a life changing journey!
