Lost in Faith

This comes from some friends who attend Shoal Creek. The personal stories that Dave Ramsey uses touched them so that they agreed to allow their names and stuff to be used, hoping their story might encourage others.

Roy

Jennifer has always handled our finances. We built a bigger house in
2001 because we “crunched the numbers” and figured we could swing the payment, despite losing Jennifer’s income as she stayed at home to raise our daughter. We planned on another child and knew our house would feel cramped. The house payment was a strain, but we were always told “buy as much house as you can” and then we would adjust our lifestyle as time went on. We never really adjusted our lifestyle anywhere else and our credit cards began to pick up the slack. Two car payments and a house payment that was nearly double found us with too much month at the end of the money. I knew it was stressing Jennifer out because we were finishing in the red each month, literally taking in less money than we were spending. Neither one of us are extravagant, we’re quite stingy (so I thought). We just didn’t make the money we were spending. Each year we would receive a large rebate from the IRS (I purposely had more taken out in taxes to get a big chunk back) and we would pay off the credit card that was supplementing our way of life. Then the cycle would start all over again.

When we got our “07 tax return, GENERATE was going on at SCCC. We were proud to pledge a thousand dollars of it and made a commitment to a monthly amount, too. Well, we had ourselves in such a financial cluster we couldn’t follow through with our commitment. Jennifer and I were very embarrassed to have made this commitment and then not follow through with it. Jennifer would tell me about the financial problem in our family and I would listen to her and just offer enough to get her to leave me alone about it. I guess I felt like I /made
/the money, I don’t want to have to /manage /it, too. I thought that was her job. In August, we borrowed nearly $9,000 from Jennifer’s father to pay off a credit card and get rid of the ridiculous interest rate we were paying Discover.

Fed up, Jennifer did some research (again, I liked to ignore the finances) and came upon Dave Ramsey. She bought The Total Money Makeover on Ebay (like I say, we’re thrifty!) and she read the book. She gave it to me to read and I actually did. I’m not a reader, but I read it. It found myself excited to read the plan Ramsey laid out in the book. It seemed so logical. The personal stories in TMM lit a fire in me, and I began to see how we could actually control our finances.
As a bonus, his message was Bible-based, and I found out SCCC had held FPU classes in the past. In a matter of a couple of weeks, we became “gazelle-intense”. We sat down TOGETHER and worked out a budget, probably the hardest step for me. We spent all of our money on paper first. We began using the envelope system and paying cash for everything we did. We budgeted $25 every two weeks as BAM (bummin’around money) BETWEEN THE TWO 0F US. Yes, $12.50 each every two weeks.

Jennifer and I saw what our car payments did to our monthly budget and it became glowingly obvious we needed to sell our cars and purchase vehicles we could afford WITH CASH. That’s just what we did. We had our emergency $1000 saved, and we sold two cars. It pained Jennifer to sell her “tree-hugger mobile”, the Prius Hybrid, but we both knew what we had to do. I made $5,000 off of my vehicle, and bought her a $3,100 car with cash. The guy wanted $4,000 for it, but when you whip out $3,100 in cash right before Christmas, people tend to get giddy! We saved another thousand bucks and I paid cash for a small, dependable truck. Bam, $650 a month to put towards our debt. As a bonus, our insurance went down a little on older cars. More money for the debt snowball. I adjusted my claims for taxes to be much more reasonable and we put that money towards paying off Jennifer’s dad. Now when we did our monthly budget, we were finishing with money left! Jennifer and I picked up an extra job (working security at a bank) to make money, and put that towards our debt. Next thing we knew, we were paying her father in $1,000 chunks every two weeks, instead of the $200 monthly payments we had promised him! We were rockin’ and fired up with each payment we would make. We would sit down and spend our money “on paper, on purpose” every time I got a check. We really did “get a raise” when we did that!

Last Monday, we paid off Jen’s dad with a final $3,340 payment. We had enough left over from our income tax return, and Sunday we dropped a check in the box at church for $1,360. I cannot even tell you how good it felt to do that. And once we did that with the exception of our house, “WE’RE DEBT FREE!!!!!!!!”

We started at the end of November and as of February 11, we paid off $32,093.70.

Bryan