Are You Ready to Finally Fix Your Finances - For Good?

Bad news this month – my husband was laid off towards the end of April. While frustrating, I’m vowing not to let this screw up our debt repayment. And at the very least, we will figure out how to avoid accruing more debt during this period of uncertainty. Even though the snowball might not be…

This month we’re going to focus on streamlining the budget even further. We’ve already moved to StraightTalk for cell phone service, and talked to our insurance company about finding additional discounts. I’ve even contacted daycare to see if there were any possible discounts we might be eligible for. Leave no stone unturned, right?

We decided this month that after our April contributions to our IRAs that we’d stop contributing until we have paid off our debt. It was not an easy decision, since contributions to my traditional IRA are tax write-offs as a contractor. However, the idea of knocking off debt once and for all was just too…

We made some adjustments to our finances from the previous month, such as looking at our food budget and trying to eat out less. Our first item to attack in our snowball has been the credit card since the interest rate on it is so much higher than anything else.

This month, we finally switched from just tracking our spending in a spreadsheet and calling it a “budget” to actually budgeting. Amazing what a difference that makes! It finally clicked for me when I signed up for a budgeting bootcamp that helped me to tell our money where to actually go, versus watching it walk…

This is our baseline finance report as of the end of December 2016. We officially started really focusing on budgeting correctly in January of 2017. At this point, we’ve been paying on several of these for years but just haven’t been able to pay them off due to focusing on other costly items, such as:…