In case you are wondering where “here” is exactly, let me fill you in! We are starting the 9 week course, Financial Peace University, created by Dave Ramsey. We are documenting the process as we take the course, apply the lessons, and watch our hard work unfold into financial freedom.
So let’s “Put it in reverse, Terry!” and see how we got to this point.
When we got married in 2017, we had two car payments, a school loan payment, a new house payment, and also the mindset that having these payments meant we were finally adults. Well, watching our paycheck walk right out of the door as soon as it came in, got old real fast. So, I started researching how to get out of debt. I found this plan called the debt snowball, read maybe a website or two so I could get the main gist of it, and was ready to get our debt knocked out asap. To my husband, that sounded great, but the idea of a budget made him cringe! He was a work in progress.
Quick run down of the debt snowball:
List your debts in order of smallest to largest.
Make minimum payments on all debt and put any extra money towards your smallest debt.
Once your smallest debt is paid off, take all of that money you were putting towards the smallest debt and apply it to the second smallest debt.
Continue this process until you are debt free!
We made good money, and our expenses weren’t crazy high, so we were able to halfway dedicate ourselves to the snowball, and next thing we know, boom! There’s one car payment- gone. We start to work on the next debt, and surprise! We find out we are pregnant. At that point, we had to readjust our plan. That meant we had to get our ducks in a row, and fast… well at least within 9 months.
The 9 months leading up to being first time parents is wild. Why does no-one tell you to just chill out? I think this is where my obsession with spreadsheets and crunching numbers came into existence. I had too much stuff to learn, do, prepare and I just had to write it all down and schedule it out. So, then we have a list of things to do, items to buy, classes to take, it was chaos. We made it, but holy moly, it was crazy.
With a new baby, that meant we had to get the house baby ready. Originally, we had a long term list of work to do on our house that immediately got pushed up to the front of the line. And these were not cosmetic things, like painting, or rearranging furniture, I’m talking going under the house and fixing structural issues, moisture issues, etc… These renovations had to be financed, so boom, another loan payment. I also needed a “mom car” because my Jeep Wrangler just wasn’t going to cut it. Boom, another loan payment. And the wonderful hospital bill, boom, another payment.
So we were back to square one with the debt snowball. We paid off the hospital, house renovations, and car loan all within 2 years. A total of about $27k. If you did the math, then you probably realized this was during the heart of COVID. The school loan payments were suspended, and we were able to put that money towards our other debts. So now we are left with a suspended school loan and a house payment.
During this time, we also got sucked into putting items on our credit cards in order to get points. What a fun idea! We get to purchase the items we were going to purchase anyways, and get money back for paying with a credit card. We would pay off the balance each week and it would be great. Wrong. So wrong. At first, we were paying off the balance each week, then month, then we would pay a majority of it off, until we weren't really paying attention to what we were actually spending. And not to mention, the "points" we would earn, really didn't amount up to anything in the grand scheme of things. So, we also had credit card debt that we needed to pay off.
In 2021, we began to stack our savings. We were determined that the next step for our family was to buy land and build a house. Started looking at floor plans, meeting with our realtor, general contractors, all of the fun stuff! Looking back at my spreadsheet from that year, we were set to purchase land in January of 2022, and hopefully be in our newly built house by the end of the year. Spoiler! That didn’t happen. Land in our desired area basically doubled, and building supplies increased drastically as well. So we would have to either be strapped to a crazy mortgage payment or wait. Everything from our gut to Dave Ramsey said that was not the way to go. The Lord had us in a waiting period. Not our plan, but we had to adapt nonetheless. We began talking out all of our options from that point. Do we save up to buy land, and not build on it right away? Or do we build a garage apartment on the land and live in that while our house was being built? Do we settle and not get exactly what we want? Do we purchase a house and renovate it over time to become our dream home?
So many options, but we decided to just wait and be patient. However, that is not my strongest quality, or honestly even a word I would use to describe me at all. We had a large amount of savings, and a son who I wanted to experience things with, and a house that I felt was too small to live efficiently. It needed more storage, needed to be updated for resale value in the future, etc… So we booked 2 trips to Disney, got new cabinets/countertops in our kitchen, refloored our entire house, and bought a truck. These were and still are all great investments. Investments in our home, family, memories, etc… However, we had to finance the home renovations and the truck and anyone even remotely aware of Dave Ramsey’s plan is currently having a heart attack and screaming at their phone as they read this. This is the biggest sin!
Well we did it, loved our trips, love our updated home, and I loved being able to see my husband get a truck, which is something he has talked about doing since we first got married. Now the damage is done and we are on a mission to knock out our debt and build our savings.
I started to listen to the Dave Ramsey podcasts just to get some encouragement and learn more about money, debt, investing, etc… I felt like I was on my own at that point, mainly because I didn’t relay the information that I was learning to my husband. I would get frustrated when his little amount of spending didn’t line up with my plan that he had no idea about. While listening to the Dave Ramsey Podcast, I heard some really dumb people, which made me feel a lot better about myself! But, then I heard some people whose situation was very similar to ours. They all talked about how they took Financial Peace University and it helped them get out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, as well as build up their retirement, kids’ funds, make large purchases in cash, and I was totally interested.
I realized that if I wanted to achieve all of that and more, it would have to be a team effort. I asked my husband about taking Financial Peace University with me, and he agreed, kind of… and we were off!
We purchased the Financial Peace University package in January of 2023. It came with the Financial Peace University courses, a 3 month subscription to Every Dollar Premium, and access to personal finance coaches. We got started the last week in January so that we would be able to start our budget full time in February.
I realized when I was doing research, that there wasn’t much information from people actually going through the process. All I could find were people who made it through the program, were on the other side with no debt and a great future for their family. So, in an attempt to help anyone with their own journey to Financial Peace, we will be documenting ours! All the good, the bad and the ugly. We know there will be hard decisions to make, things to cut out, things that will work for us and things that won’t. So, if you are thinking about starting your own journey and just don’t have the support system or you don’t have the accountability, we’ve got you! I have seen what this process can do from when we did the debt snowball the first time, now we are excited to see where it will take us when we actually stick to it and be intentional with our money.
See you soon!
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