Money Matters

I mentioned in my inaugural post that I’m in debt. I didn’t say how much, but I’ll come clean….its nearly $45K (not counting my house). Seriously–a ridiculous amount, especially when I make plenty for my needs. I’ve just not made being a good steward of my financial resources a priority.

One of my big “turn-my-life-around” goals is to get a handle on this, pay it off, save for emergencies and for retirement.

I’ve done a lot of research about different methods for approaching this situation. I’ve taken Financial Peace University by Dave Ramsey a few times, but never made it a priority. I am recommitting. I already have Baby Step 1 conquered (savings of $1K). However, I have still been using my credit cards. I know myself. I know that it takes me time to really commit to something, so I’m not going to beat myself up about this. So here’s the plan:

  • I didn’t set up a November budget. This weekend I’ll go through my account and get a budget for the rest of the month completed.
  • I will go through all of my auto payments that are coming out of credit card and get them switched over to my debit card.
  • I have already set up an amortization schedule for all of my debt that includes information on the interest and set up an anticipated pay-off plan. If I pay minimums with an additional $200 per month, I can have this debt paid off in 3 years and 1 month.
  • I will start to identify areas where I can trim the budget and put more funds towards payment of debt so I can hopefully pay it off sooner.

I am really excited to move this up the priority chain. I’m meeting with a retirement counselor tomorrow–not with the anticipation of retiring soon, but with the anticipation of seeing what my retirement picture looks like right now in order to make a plan so that when my debts are paid off I can start saving more for retirement.

Do you have any great strategies for saving money? What are your biggest struggles surrounding money, debt or savings?


Talk To Me!


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: