Tonight, Joshua and I will start our second round of co-coordinating Financial Peace University at our church. It also marks one year that we began this journey, and I can’t help but think how far we’ve come.
Joshua and I started Financial Peace University a year ago with “too much month at the end of our money” and a variety of debt (credit cards, car lease, mortgage, furniture payments), but with the optimism of winning with money. We had no idea that nine weeks later we would have cut up all our credit cards with a vow of never going back to borrowing money.
Now a year later we’re FPU coordinators and able to share our story and wisdom with others. We do a budget every month, use cash for the majority of purchases, we’re debt-free minus the house, have a fully-funded emergency fund, contributing to retirement, and we try to incorporate different ways we can be better spenders and givers everyday.
I feel like a broken record sometimes, but this was truly an awesome class. If you have the opportunity to take it… take it!
Otherwise I recommend Dave’s book that started it all, The Total Money Makeover. Warning: if you invite me to your wedding, you’re getting this book from me as a wedding present because man I wish someone had given us this book as a wedding gift! It truly changed our lives, our way of thinking, and our marriage – for the better!
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Do you guys not have any student loans? That’s our only debt (no car payment, no mortgage, no credit card debt, etc.) and it’s finally getting to a point where I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but man, it’s taken nearly ten years to get to that point. Now I’m thinking I probably should have tried to overpay it when I was actually making a decent amount of money!
We got lucky with student loans. Joshua paid his off fairly quickly since he didn’t have much. As for me, my grandparents paid for school. Reluctantly, I might add because they wanted me to go to Stanford and become a lawyer, and well, we all know how THAT turned out!
Do you guys not have any student loans? That’s our only debt (no car payment, no mortgage, no credit card debt, etc.) and it’s finally getting to a point where I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but man, it’s taken nearly ten years to get to that point. Now I’m thinking I probably should have tried to overpay it when I was actually making a decent amount of money!
We got lucky with student loans. Joshua paid his off fairly quickly since he didn’t have much. As for me, my grandparents paid for school. Reluctantly, I might add because they wanted me to go to Stanford and become a lawyer, and well, we all know how THAT turned out!
Ahh, lucky! My parents paid for some of mine but the rest all came to me as student loans.