Finance is for Nerds.

My parents gave me a book a while back. (A looong while back.) The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I looked at it, and it was interesting, but I never read it. However, I didn't get rid of it either. So here, a few years later, I decided to read it, when I realized that, with student loans and car loans and everything else, my husband and I are totaling about $30k in debt. That scares the pants off me, because I know how easy it is for something to upset the balance of day-to-day life and send you into a budgeting tail spin. So I decided to take it for a read.

I wasn't raised with the best financial sense, or any, really. About the time I should've been learning about money management, either at home or from my parents (which would've been a disaster anyway..), I was living more or less on my own, and I dropped out of high school not long after. Like a lot of late teen/early 20-somethings, my idea of being good with my finances was being able to buy bread and milk after paying my bills at the end of the month. I never had anything to spare. Once I got married and had two incomes to work with, my husband and I got better about our money and were able to put away savings, which we would occasionally clean out for a large purchase and then build back up slowly. Then we discovered the credit card.

Credit cards are the devil. I believe this entirely. It's a system that lets people spend money they don't have, so they can pay it back incrimentally for the rest of their lives. The idea of a person without credit card debt is mind boggling, much like the idea of not having a car note or a mortgage. I've always been leery of large, recurring charges, and have never paid more that $300 a month for a car loan. My first financed car was only $140 a month. Still, I convinced myself that it was ok to trade my car in for a brand-new sedan, a beautiful shiny blue thing that just screamed 'You know you want me.' We weren't upside-down on my old Focus, so we traded her in and bought this blue beauty. My car payment went up to $270 a month, and I now have a $17k car loan, and I hate it. Not the car, but the weight of the debt that came along with it.

I pay all the bills for my household, so I'm the one who really feels the weight of our debts, and I got tired of it. I remembered my finance book, and I decided to read it. I was ready to hate it, to disbelieve it, to deny it, but I admit, I'm hooked. It's not a scheme, though it is rather subversive in that it describes how to turn your financial situation around and live WITHOUT DEBT. It's hard to imagine, right?

Our tax return came in, and I've written up a budget with it included, and if my husband and I are solid on our committment to curtail our spending and stick to it, we'll have $10k paid off by July. I don't know the totals yet for the whole year, because I haven't gotten that far, but I'm pretty serious about making it happen. I want to cut up my credit cards. I want to hack and slash my student loans. And I want to destroy my car note. I want to owe nothing and be able to buy things outright. And I want to start saving for a house. Crazy dreams, right? But with it, it can happen.

I'm not trying to sell the book, exactly. More the idea behind it, that people can live without credit and without debt. It's possible. Imagine the stress that could be taken away if you were living to live with the bare minimum and pay off your credit cards, your loans, your car, and even your mortgage. It's an exciting prospect.

My husband isn't really feeling the same push I am to get out from under our debts, but he trusts me to go with it. I'm hoping he'll get fully on board once he sees how much we were putting towards them. I figure as long as he gets his occasional toy and the internet and electricity doesn't get cut off, he'll be happy. Men are simple like that.

If you're interested, here's the link.

https://www.mytotalmoneymakeover.com/

Finance isn't just for nerds anymore.


TxT