I've been putting off writing for months now so, after some encouragement from a friend (Thanks Gayle!) I decided I best come back, pick up the pieces, especially since the journey is anything but complete and admit our mistakes, triumph over our wins and continue down the road.
Long, long, long story short...not LONG <must be a key word> after my last entry in May we started going through money like it was water. We were following FPU on our own and had made it to lesson 3 or 4 (can't really remember) when all hell broke loose. Our little kitten was having a lot of health issues that were leading to surgeries, we also had a pending two week trip (driving to Florida and back) that we could not cancel. We had CONsolidated (notice the emphasis on "con"...we have since learned this) some credit cards to give us one payment instead of 3, each week the cat kept costing money and it was time to leave for Florida. There was nothing we could do, we boarded the dog at "puppy camp" and the cats went to our vet, they were going to keep an eye on Sheldon daily, we were to call every day and they had Sheldon's surgeons phone number incase things went poorly.
Well, one week in things went poorly. I stressed 2,000 miles away, I cried, we spent and finally we let go and fell off our wagon.
End result: Trip was a success, was wonderful to see family, credit was used (unfortunately), cat lived and ended up costing $6,000.00. Yes...six THOUSAND dollars. At no point did anyone say in the beginning "your cat has this problem and it will cost $6,000 dollars to get him better. I think had that happened decisions might have been made that led down maybe a different path. No, what happened was one procedure led to another, $200 dollars here, $400 dollars there and by the time you are $4,000 dollars in you think what do I have to lose at this point? Save him.
When we got home we tallied up the damage and began to construct our plan of attack.
We kept meaning to get back to our Financial Peace University studies on our own but we always found a reason why we couldn't that day. Always something going on. Then one Sunday morning at church we were reading the bulletin waiting for service to start when we saw that our church would be hosting FPU's 9 week course starting in October. Being life time members we signed up and now every Sunday night we drive to West St. Paul to church and attend FPU with a lot of other people and I love it. The accountability and support is wonderful.
We've finally caught back up with our wagon, brushed ourselves off and climbed back up and are heading in the right direction once again. We have even made a lot of good progress!
We have 3 classes left and here is where we are:
- We have completed Baby Step 1 which is keep a $1,000 dollar cash emergency fund. We have this and we have actually USED it! It was such a strange feeling to have my computer break and take it to get fixed and pay $200.00 cash to fix it! no stress, no worries of "omg where are we going to get this money" and even better, there was no "oh well, we can't afford to fix it". We fixed it, we paid for it and we replaced that $200.00. BOOYAH!
- We have our envelope system in full swing!! On pay day we withdrawal cash for the following envelopes
- Groceries (2 weeks)
- Matt's Lunch (2 weeks)
- Church Tithe (2 weeks)
- Auto repair fund
- Our pocket money (this is way small but it's necessary)
- Thanksgiving/Christmas
- We then pay our bills - after that we don't use the account. Period.
- We have been doing our Debt Snowball for a couple of months now and we finally paid off our FIRST credit card! YES what a feeling! We will have another credit card paid off in just a few weeks and I am so excited!
- We have our bi-weekly budget committee meetings
- We do our homework and best yet we TALK about things like plans and dreams and how we each are feeling as the days tick by
- We work TOGETHER
Now that we are in our wagon again I KNOW we are on the right road to success!
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