Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Financial Peace - March Update

Well, I've been reading a few other blogs and many who are also doing the Dave Ramsey plan are posting updates. I thought it was a great idea so here is my very first update.

We started our Financial Peace adventure in August 2007. With a mortgage, about $30K in credit card bills and student loans, no savings and no budget it wasn't looking good. However, now I can say that we have baby step 1 completed with our $1000 emergency fund in place, a "sinking fund" that is used for those expenses that come around once or twice a year and we are working on paying off debt using the debt snowball. We have STOPPED using credit cards completely and have paid off two of them. We have one more that will be coming off soon and another that will meet it's death with our "Stimulus package" payment. Things are looking better but it will still take us about 2 and a half years to get those things paid off...less when we use our income tax refunds which we plan to do.

How did we do in March? We stayed pretty close to our grocery budget of $550 per month. This includes stuff like cleaning supplies and paper products. It's difficult with a family of seven and I don't always succeed but we do try hard to save money in that area. This is our most difficult area to control.

All of our other budgeted areas, home maintenance, clothing, personal supplies, entertainment we fine...we had money left in the envelopes and we always let that money carry over to the next month. We let it carry over to the next month because many times we'll save up for things this way or we'll not have anything in that area that month but need more the next month. This is especially true for home maintenance and clothing.

Have you started your journey to Financial Peace? It's a great place to be and we're looking forward to our goal of being debt free!

Have a great day!

Mavis D.

2 comments:

cargon said...

Hey there,

I came across your blog via Money Saving Mom and am glad to see that my family is not the only one with moutnains of debt to pay off. You're right, though, baby steps. We'll get there some day! I also may be partial to your blog because my DD and you share the same name!

Mavis D. said...

No Way! That's so cool! Growing up I really didn't like my name because people would mispronounce it but I've grown to like it. :)

If you are a "Tonight Show" fan, Jay Leno's wife's name is also Mavis. :)

Later,
Mavis D.