Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Our Journey to Financial Peace

A year ago, I became fed up. My wife and I both have great jobs and make good salaries. But, when I sat down to pay the bills, I found that we had no money left to buy groceries. We had too much debt; too many payments.

It was last July when I discovered Dave Ramsey. His radio program motivated me to get serious about our money.

I have been resisting blogging about this because it is somewhat personal, but I've now decided to blog about our debt-free journey.

I have a formulated a lot of opinions on money and debt over the past 11 months. I'll be sharing those along the way as I share our journey with you.

Here is a rundown of our debt (except our house payments) when we started our journey on the first of August, 2006:

Orthodontist: $1,800
Best Buy Credit Card: $1,847
VISA 1: $4,468
VISA 2: $8,158
VISA 3: $12,357
BMW: $20,000
Care Credit: $1,600
2nd Mortgage: $12,109
2nd Mortgage: $32,029
Volvo: $36,500
TOTAL: $130,868

Just 11 months later, here is the rundown:

Taurus: $10,625
2nd Mortgage: $11,995
2nd Mortgage: $31,665
Volvo: $31,500
TOTAL: $85,745

You might be wondering why we have so many mortgage payments. We have two houses. In 2005, we purchased a home for my wife's parents. I think it's safe to say that we really couldn't afford it, but it was important to us to help them out. To rearrange our debt, we got a second mortgage on our primary home. Then we got a mortgage and a second mortgage on the house we purchased.

Our immediate goal is to pay off all our debt except for our 2 main house payments. So we have $85,745 to go.

We've made great progress in our first year. We've paid off over $45,000 in debt in just one year.

In a future post, I'll explain how we were able to do that.

Remember: "Debt is Dumb, Cash is King!"

1 comment:

Harry Hostetter said...

It's amazing how fast it drops once you get focused.