I have always been poor. Growing up I had no money to do anything so when I got money I never wanted to spend it. I have always been the type to ask myself if I really need something and if I don't, then I don't buy it. Bradley was always really good at saving up his money too. When he was younger he was able to buy a Sega and a Nintendo all by himself because he saved up for them. For you younger people they were actually quite expensive when they first came out.
So how did we get into the mess that we are in? When Brad was working at Menards he worked around 60 or so hours a week for a while. We were pulling in around $500 more a week than now. Yes $500 more a WEEK! Plus he had received pretty substantial bonuses. Where did all that money go? Looking back we are just flabbergasted how we just pretty much blew through it. We would go out to eat all the time and just spend money on stupid things that we didn't need. It's easy to blow through money if you don't really have to think about it.
We decided to give up Menards for a banking job that would give him more time to spend with us. We are making quite a bit less than what he was making and instead of getting a lot of overtime he gets none. Now that we are in the place we are, we really realize how much we wasted money. It is important to us that I raise our children so I currently do not work. We tried to find a part time job for me but so far nothing has worked out. We also cannot afford to put our kids in daycare, we would be actually losing money that way. I have my oils business that I have been starting up but it has been hard for me to focus on that with all the medical things I have had to go through with Eli.
This past year has been great with Brad home but it has also been very stressful. We are just making ends meet and we are living paycheck to paycheck. We really haven't had much hope or even a clue to what we were going to do. Brad was very stressed out about our finances. I really didn't deal with them much so even though I would get stressed out too it wasn't to the point he was. It is really stressful to be in the point where your bills equal out to more than what you make. We didn't know how to fix it.
That's when our church introduced their Live Free series and our growth groups started to do Financial Peace University by Dave. The things that Dave Ramsey says makes a lot of sense. We are starting to do the steps needed and I think we have one or two weeks left of videos in our growth group to watch. It has given us hope where we had none. It hasn't been easy and now we are making some extremely hard decisions but we reallly feel like it will be worth it in the end.
Our progress has been slow but steady. We now have money in a savings account that is not connected in any way to any of our other bank accounts. That helps us be able to keep it in there and not want to spend it. We have also decided to cut up two of our credit cards. This is big for us because we really like our credit cards. We have been also able to pay off completely one of our credit cards and we are working on making a plan to pay off our other ones. We have decided to try to get Income Based Repayment for our student loans so we can work on paying off some of our higher interest things. We have been approved for that so we are pretty excited.
The hardest thing that we have decided to do is get rid of our Dodge Charger. We really love that car but we realize that it is not ideal for a 3 kid family. We also don't love the high interest rate they gave us for it and the $550 a month payment. We are not sure what happened when we got it at the dealership but we think we were kind of bamboozled on it. The interest rate is pretty high and we know we would have never gotten it if we knew how high it really was. We decided that we are going to get rid of it and get a less expensive vehicle with a lot less of a payment. This will make the most difference with our month to month budget.
Now that we are doing that we can actually put together a budget! We are also going to an all cash system and we are going to try to do the snowball system that Dave Ramsey advises us to do. I have been selling a lot of stuff in our house that I know we don't use anymore and have been able to come up with some money doing that. I am also going to do a garage sale sometime this summer.
Our goal is to get rid of our credit card debt completely in a year. We would like to do it by the end of this year, but we are unsure if that is a realistic goal. For the past year I have been making 95% of our meals at home instead of going out so we are saving a lot of money there. We don't do joy rides in our car like we used to and we don't spend money like crazy people anymore. We are hoping with all the changes that we make we can accomplish our goals.
We have faith with all of the steps that we are taking that we can really do this and be debt free. My husband and my relationship has really turned around too. We were arguing a lot about our money situation so it is nice that we have a plan and it is not a huge stress on us anymore. For the first time we have a huge amount of hope and I cannot wait to keep on updating you guys with our progress!
Peace and Love,
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