Finance? YOU?? What??

Yes. Me. Why write about finance? Was I a finance major in college? Heh. No. My math class was something to the effect of, “Math and Imagination”. It was so useless the semester after I took it the college wised up and dropped it from their curriculum.

Do I love accounting? Nope. Am I certified in all things “financial advisorish” (i.e., sell insurance)? Nope. Not that either. I am choosing to write about finances and make it a part of my blog because of this one piece of advice, this little thing that everyone forgets to tell us: IT’S JUST NOT THAT COMPLICATED.

See? Whew! No, in all seriousness. I think we see the bills, we look at the check register, we think about college savings plans or 401ks or IRAs or every other acronym that is finance related and think, “Yeah, right. I don’t get it. I’m not going to get it.” Not true my friend. Not true. I hate math with a passion. We have a mutual dislike for each other to be exact, it doesn’t work for me and I don’t work for it.

But finances? Personal finance to be exact? It’s a whole other thing. It’s something that is actually fun (shhhh… supposed to be a secret), can be exciting (yes, even while paying off debt), oh yeah – and it can in fact help to save your marriage. Just an added bonus there.

Nobody says you have to listen to me, but I do want to write to make it make sense. Am I qualified? I think so. Am I perfect on the finance front? Oh no. But here is our story – you can decide from here if you want to take the journey with me.

In 2008 we received our tax statements from the previous year. Raymonn and I looked at each other with puzzled looks and said, “Where did all of this go?” We had no clue. No idea. We were determined that it wouldn’t happen again. We then received our 2008 tax statements. I walked into R’s office and said, “Wait. Is this not deja vu? Where did all of this go??” One word can sum up what I was feeling: embarassment. Maybe two – Extreme Embarassment. Not that we’re millionaires, not that we made even a ton of money – but we could not tell you where it went. We had absolutely nothing to show for any source of income it seemed. Here we were two responsible adults it seemed, hard working, parents – and yet I was downright embarassed, especially since we had done this now twice with zero action taken.

So right then and there we decided we’d try to tally up our debts and figure out 5 that we wanted to get taken care of that year. So AFTER we made our goal, I figured that we had talked the talk a year ago – there has to be a way to walk the walk. There had to be somebody smarter than me with this. That is when I re-found Dave Ramsey. I had heard of him when my parents took his Financial Peace University class at our church when I was in college. But this was the first time I really sat down to try and figure out who this guy was, what made him worthy of listening to. Turns out he has a great story that floored me. I believed he knew more about this stuff than I did and so I thought I’d give it a shot. I signed up for the Total Money Makeover and off we went.

There were two things initially that it asked us to do: 1. Tally up all of your debts. All of them. Don’t be scared, just do it. I fell off of my chair. Literally – I shrank to the floor. The initial embarassment I felt around tax time was nothing compared to this. How in the world did we get ourselves into almost $95,000 worth of debt (not including the mortgage)?? We simply wandered in. We were not paying attention. We were not making our money work for us. It was embarassing.

The second thing was just to track every penny you spent that first month. Don’t make a budget yet just track it, you have to track it in order to know what needs to change. 30% of what we brought in went toward our debt. THIRTY. The money we earned was leaving our hands faster than you can imagine. Want to know how much went toward giving? 0.4% Ridiculous. Things needed to change.

And change they did. We together had a plan of attack. We had our snowball laid out in front of us – we worked together on a mostly cash base budget. We tweaked, we sweated, we discussed – we worked a plan together. Certain things R could care less about – other things like calculating how much faster we could pay off our debt – that inspired him. We sold things, we were craigslist maniacs, we had a garage sale, we didn’t shop (gasp!). Here’s the running theme in all of this – we worked a PLAN and we worked it TOGETHER. Over the next 15 months we were able to work our way out of that almost $95k in debt. Of that I am proud of us for.

We also worked our way through this thing called marriage and parenting and individualism – all wrapped up in life and creating a life together. That is the true success story. Now we’re attacking this mortgage. We dream, we hope, we work hard. I see my friends and family hurting or frustrated and I just want to help. I am no expert, but I’m now so interested in this thing called Personal Finance. I can’t pull myself away. So I thought that of course my way is not the only way, Dave’s way is not the only way – but if there is even a small nugget of hope that can be spread to someone who feels hopeless, frustrated, or just plain confused – that’s a good thing. And if that hope gets to be contaigous? That’s a great thing. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.