Football is the Answer for Your Budget
One of the best things about this time of year is football season is here. You can use this to your budget’s advantage. The beauty of football season is that you can have a get together every weekend at yours or someone’s house where you can enjoy free football and cheap food and drinks. Do this instead of going out to eat with friends while not sacrificing the social time. Here are the advantages of home football watching parties:
- Most local football games are free on your tv packages.
- Football food is very cheap compared to eating out.
- More Beverage choices for less.
- No babysitters required.
- More hours of entertainment than just eating out.
So load up on the nachos and pull out that new Buffalo Chicken Dip Recipe. Get on the horn to your friends because there is probably game getting ready to kick-off.
Now don’t forget to enjoy the Georgia Tech-Miami game tonight on ESPN and watch Georgia Tech go “Reck Style” on Miami.
Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps
In honor of Dave Ramsey’s upcoming live show coming to Atlanta on Sept 19th, let’s discuss his system to winning with money. Seven steps to that will simplify your financial life. These steps are called the baby steps because they’re incremental steps to
help focus you efforts. Well here they are:
Baby Step 1: Save $1,000 to start an emergency fund. This step should take between 1-2 months at the most. Tighten down the budget and get the dreaded 2nd job if necessary. This fund will help buffer you from Murphy in the short term. This is also where you would pause your long-term investments for retirement.
Baby Step 2: Pay off all your debt using the debt snowball. Order your debts (minus your home mortgage) smallest to largest and start throwing money at the smallest debt first and work your way down the list. You will build psychological momentum as your see those smallest debts get knocked out. If you have a 2nd mortgage, you include in this step unless it is over half your annual income.
Baby Step 3: Save 3-6 month living expenses for a fully funded emergency fund. Now that you have no debt but your house; take all the money that you were paying towards debt and stash it into your emergency fund. Now your talking serious Murphy repellent.
Baby Step 4: Invest 15% of your household income into Roth IRA’s and 401k retirement funds. Now your back on the investing train and you have some breathing room in your finances. And I am sure you sleeping more soundly with the emergency fund in place.
Baby Step 5: Start a college fund for your children. Your kids will appreciate this one. You can do this concurrently with Baby Step 4.
Baby Step 6: Pay off your home early. Now is the time you systematically start paying extra on your mortgage. Who wants to pay off a house in 30 years? 10 years sound much better and think of all the interest you will save.
Baby Step 7: Build wealth and give! You have now achieved financial peace. You have a paid for house, no debt, and a fully funded emergency fund. Now you can invest your entire house payment per month. While your investing; how about giving to others; you can afford it.
These steps are simple, but effective. And if you follow these steps you will be in control of your finances and have financial peace.
LifeTuner Live Podcast
The first edition of Lifetuner Chat Carnival is posted. Life’s Lessons Learned Hard is the theme and it seems that many folks have learned their best lessons the hard way. My post “Never Again” was included and I want to give many thanks to Keith Morris for organizing the carnival. So give their site a look and enjoy many of the great posts where people did “stupid with zeros on the end”, but manged to learn from it.
Tonight at 10pm EDT there will be a live podcast on Talkshoe where some of the posters will discuss their stories and take questions. You can follow this link to join us tonight or check it out later via the download.
Never again
The words “never again” reflect true pain. The kind of pain where your DNA gets altered in the process. I can remember the day that I uttered these words. I will never again buy a house before I sell my existing house.
Now that I say it out loud, it sounds pretty obvious. And I wished that it had sounded that obvious the day we signed a contract for a new home without a contingency to sell our existing home (our Realtor said the builder wasn’t taking contingent offers). House fever was in full affect and my wife and I were getting ready to pay for it (literally).
Since I am telling you this story, you can probably assume that we were not able to sell our old house. So we had to make two mortgage payments a month; not for just one month, not for just two months, but for six long months!!! All this with a 9 month old baby and my wife was expecting our 2nd child. sigh.
Just writing about it brings back the fear, the stress, and the anger. My job suffered, my marriage suffered, my life suffered. We lived on credit cards during this time which did little to help my stress. So it was at this point I said it. “Never Again!”
I want to thank the nice, young, married couple who eventually bought my old house and saved us from our stupidity. I should probably go by there and take them a nice dessert. But for all the pain we suffered, it did teach us a valuable lesson that I will always share with others.
Braking the Bank
Along this journey of mine, I have really pushed the bounds of my comfort zone. Whether it has been running, creating a budget, or just saying “no”; I knew that I needed to make changes in my life. Today, I continued the progress and once again yielded great results. I was able to replace my worn out brake pads and rotors on my wife’s (almost paid-off) minivan.
The mechanic, several months ago, had quoted me almost $650 to do the repair. Usually, this would have been something I would never thought to attempt. “What happens if I mess it up?” would have crippled me before I ever got started in my former “life”. Thanks to a co-worker (Ted, you are the man!), I was convinced that this isn’t just something I could do, but something I must do.
The obvious benefit to the repair was the immediate savings. A $650 repair job was pared down to $190 which saved me almost $500 as well as saving this month’s budget from total disaster. I think the best part was the confidence that I could make the repairs again when needed. Furthermore, other repairs will not be so quickly dismissed as un-doable.
It’s funny to me how something that just started as improving my financial lot in life has really become more about improving my entire life. But if nothing else, I have learned that leaving your comfort zones can yield unpredictable, but positive returns. So what are you waiting for? Try something new and have no fear.
-
Twitter Tracker
-
-
-
