Monday, March 23, 2009

Plastectomy

I have a defunct blog, and it pains me to know that. It was all about saving money... and it has been 5 months since I wrote on it. I'm just not sure that I can keep it up the way I would like now that we are back from Russia. I hate things that end poorly.... I like good closure, and my frugal blog was not that. I'm keeping it open and maybe I'll find the time again.

In the meantime, Chris and I have been doing a Total Money Makeover. I have read a lot of Dave Ramsey's materials and listened to him online. But we both decided that we wanted to do a study together of the book. So for the past several weeks we have been reading the chapters out loud to one another in the evenings. It's actually been interesting and has opened up discussion. We also sat down and wrote out our budget.... together. That was huge too. The together part! It wasn't easy, and we had plenty of "discussions" but we did it.

I can't tell you how much smoother things go when your husband is on board, and actually takes the lead. It's amazing when we actually share a vision for something, because we are both fired up to see it come to fruition. Anyway.... we are getting gazelle intense about paying off our debt completely. Seriously gazelle intense... as in what can we sell to make it happen. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime we also had a plastectomy ceremony last evening with the boys. We got all the credit cards out...many of store cards we had put away and didn't use. We got four pair of scissors and each person got to pick a card from the fan deck. Snip, snip snip...... We have one card left and we froze it in a big chunk of ice. That way if we ever feel the impulse to buy something on credit, we have to thaw it out completely and hopefully the impulse will have passed! When we have our 3-6 month emergency fund in place we'll probably cut up that last card too. :-) Anyhow.....This is the result of our plastectomy.

3 comments:

Troy and Rachel said...

I love your Pastectomy! I hope you find time to post on your Coins in the Couch blog - you got me hooked into my other blog! We are working on a money makeover too!

Carey and Norman said...

What a great idea...and great learning experience for your children. I love the frozen credit card idea too. Great stuff. We use ours to buy things online or where we don't want to use our debit card (traveling, etc.). This way you can view purchases before they are withdrawn from your account. We try to pay it off monthly. We had a few months post adoption with fees, but we are hoping to stay credit card debt free now!

Nekey said...

Yay! Good Luck!