This Semester: Finances

In my quest to better my home-running skills, my hubby and I designed 2 classes for this semester: Child Safety and Finances. Here is what I'm doing for the Finances course.

Assignments:

1) Complete Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University (go to www.daveramsey.com and click on "classes").  I found a course that meets every Tuesday night for nine weeks at a church down the street. So far it is LIFE CHANGING, people.

2) Create a mint.com account. Basically this links all of your bank accounts, credit cards, debt, etc in one place to help you chart spending and debt-reduction. 

3) Create a debt-free-in-5-years-or-less plan. When we get out of debt (which is basically $18,000 in school loans), we are going to sock away a full emergency fund, which is 3-6 months of expenses (thank you Dave Ramsey), and THEN we will start saving for our debt-free vacation. We want to go to Florida, beach it up, and celebrate becoming debt free! This will probably take us about 5 years if we stay focused and work our butts off at paying off debt. 

This is going to be a challenge for us because we're doing this on one income. But we are willing to make sacrifices, like renting a 2 bedroom apartment rather than looking for a house, and sharing a vehicle rather than paying for gas and insurance for two. I like this quote from Dave Ramsey: "If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else."  So that's the plan for the semester: create a spending, saving, and debt-reducing plan to get our "net worth" in the positives over the next few years. Boom!