Friday, August 12, 2011

Our Story part 2: Deciding to change the future

When I wrote about how we got into the financial mess in which we currently find ourselves, I left it intentionally brief. There's time to discuss the results of our coming to our senses in later posts. I want to talk today about the events that led to our making the decision to start Financial Peace University.

There are few things more demoralizing than overdrawing on your checking account. Really, there's no reason to ever do it; but people do it every day. It felt like no matter how we careful we tried to be, the numbers at the end of the month were always red on the Bank of Evil (aka Bank of America) website. Part of that is because they have this horrible policy of never denying your card no matter what your account looks like, and there's that insidious (possibly illegal) practice of listing your debit card transactions from largest to smallest. As much as I would like to keep verbally abusing them, this is about personal responsibility.

Emily and I tried budgeting for several months. Usually, this was Emily sitting down with Excel or Word and listing expenses and then we would  spend the money as though the "budget" didn't actually exist. This vicious cycle repeated itself between November of 2008 and March of 2009 (estimated). It was during this time that our church decided to host Financial Peace University. The promotional material talked about people who saved so many thousand dollars and paid off up to $5000 in debt. We figured we needed to do something to change the status quo. We may not have paid off that much debt in those 13weeks, but we all agree: the best $100 we've ever spent.

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