Uncle Dave Says More...
{Start at the beginning of the story...} So we enrolled in Financial Peace University at our church in January 2009, and the journey began. We learned a lot in the first few weeks about how we each think about money, and how I am nerd and Kels is a free spirit. We worked for 4 hours one night on our first written budget.
We came out $600 in the RED.
Not a great start. It was tempting to see a similar number in the tithe column and think about not giving God His rightful 10%, but Uncle Dave had told us that it's not a mathematic equation, and when you give, you receive more. He was right, and somehow we ended up with a surplus after the first few weeks of faithfully tithing.
We started to follow Uncle Dave's guidelines, trying to focus all the extra money we had on paying off our consumer debt (credit card, student loan and car loan). When we started our budget on Feb. 3, 2009, we had six student loans that varied in amounts and totaled $27,547.09, a car loan we got from Kels' parents for $10,495.05 (remember what Dave says about Thanksgiving dinner?), and a credit card with $1,729.91 charged on it.
That's $39,772.05 in debt.
We jumped in the water fully with the budget, but for the next 8 months we only dipped our toes in the other very important areas that Uncle Dave talks about. We were attacking our debt with lackluster intensity. I knew we could do better...
All posts in this series:
- Uncle Dave Says...
- Financial Peace University
- Our Second Jobs
- Our Mistakes
- Give
- Giveaway Winner