Game Changer
Hi, friends! Welcome to the next installment of "Parenting on Pennies". Today, I'll be sharing some tips and tricks to hopefully save you some money in the long run. For our family, these became what we refer to as "game changers". They helped us get out of debt, stay on budget, and we still use these practices to this day.
1. Financial Peace University
Just a heads up: In this post, a couple of these may seem counter-intuitive. This is the first one. For those of you that are unfamiliar, this is Dave Ramsey's 9 week course that teaches you how to get out of debt. The cost is roughly $100. Pay money to go to a class to help you save money? A lot of people struggle with this idea. Heck. By the time we went, I was a die hard Dave Ramsey Podcast listener. I knew the Baby Steps by heart. So why go? I seriously had my own doubts as to how much it would actually help.
Well, for us, Mr. Pennies wasn't on fire to get out of debt like I was. He never went against our plans at all, but he also wasn't, as Dave says, gazelle intense. So every so often, I would check in with him to see if he would be willing to attend FPU. To my surprise, in December of 2015, he agreed to go. I couldn't believe it. We found a local church hosting FPU in January of 2016 and we went.
What a difference this class made! It challenged us to do the things we were "kind of" doing. We were "kind of" doing a budget. We were "kind of" applying our extra money from tutoring and my husband's gigs to our debt. This class challenged us to buckle down and finally kick our debt to the curb. We paid the last third of our debt off by September of 2016. It was the fire we needed to fuel the end of our journey.
2. Tithing
Again, this is another counter-intuitive practice we adopted during our journey to debt freedom. Anyone who listens to DR know that he is a Christian who believes in tithing. A tithe is 10% of your income that should go to your local church. This was another challenge from our FPU class. At the time, we didn't have a home church. Instead, we would choose different non-profits to donate to each month. I would recommend this action to anyone in the same boat - to donate to a cause you believe in if you don't have a home church.
Now, we tithe each and every pay period. Ten percent immediately goes to our church. This is simply an act of faith on our part, but once we adopted this practice we never stopped. It truly became part of our walk not only as Christians but it also encouraged us to be more generous human beings.
3. Cash Envelopes
This was yet another practice that was extended as a challenge through FPU...I think you're starting to see a trend here. As a consumer, I didn't really want to be bothered with carrying cash. I thought, "Let's try it. If we hate it, we can go back to using our debit card." So, I ordered these nifty envelopes off Amazon called "Spendvelopes" and divided up our money into different categories.
Over the years, I have not only kept this practice, but I have it down to a science. Each pay period I go to the bank and get cash for the following categories: Groceries, Restaurants (we learned we needed to keep this category separate), Fun Money, Gas, Tithe, Dobby (our beast), Cell Phones, The JuJuBe and Medical Expenses. Before y'all try to rob me for my cash, I usually only carry the necessary envelopes for the day...and there's never very much in the envelopes for a family of three on one teacher's salary!
4. Shopping at ALDI
Such a great spot to shop! I don't typically coupon and shopping at ALDI makes me feel like I don't have to. I'm not anti-couponing, but there are few worse things I can think of than driving all over town to save a couple of dollars. I may be singing a different tune in the future, but for all the times I've tried, couponing has never worked for me. For those of you without an ALDI in your region, there are many other discount grocery stores that are similar!
5. Adopting Frugality
There is frugal. Then there is cheap. Here's the difference: someone who is cheap will settle for the item that costs less no matter what. Someone who is frugal shops their different options and may choose an item that will last longer but still doesn't break the budget. See the difference? I'm not saying we've never been guilty of being cheap. However, we've usually regretted those decisions when we reacted to the "right now" price tag instead of the long term picture.
Frugality, for our household, has given us options. Because we make a conscious effort to be frugal and live debt free, I am able to stay at home and raise our daughter. If we still had consumer debt at all, this would be impossible. Now that we've lived this way for so long, there's no going back. We will always have a long term money plan. We will always have a short term money plan: our budget.
There are more elements to our frugal lifestyle that I will elaborate on in a later post I'm sure, but for now, this is the gist of how being frugal has been a game changer for us.
6. Budgeting
My beautiful friend, the budget. Again, pre-FPU I "kind of" did a budget. I knew what our bills were each month. I mostly knew what went where. I logged into my bank account to see where we spent our money. However, putting it physically down on paper changed it all. In fact, up until this past year, I continued to put our budgets on paper. Now, I use Excel to generate our budget. It took about three months to really get the hang of making a budget, but now it takes a matter of minutes, and it's actually something I love to do.
Is each budget each month absolutely perfect? No. Things pop up. Sometimes money has to be shifted around. The difference here is huge. Before, when I was kind of budgeting, I would've had an oversight that could've made us easily overspend. Now, because I know where all of our money is going, that's not ever an issue.
Thank you guys so much for stopping by! I know this was a lengthy post, but I wanted to share with you all these practices that really helped shape our financial future. Some are so simple but had such a huge impact on us. I hope it helps someone out there! Thanks again!
1. Financial Peace University
Just a heads up: In this post, a couple of these may seem counter-intuitive. This is the first one. For those of you that are unfamiliar, this is Dave Ramsey's 9 week course that teaches you how to get out of debt. The cost is roughly $100. Pay money to go to a class to help you save money? A lot of people struggle with this idea. Heck. By the time we went, I was a die hard Dave Ramsey Podcast listener. I knew the Baby Steps by heart. So why go? I seriously had my own doubts as to how much it would actually help.
Well, for us, Mr. Pennies wasn't on fire to get out of debt like I was. He never went against our plans at all, but he also wasn't, as Dave says, gazelle intense. So every so often, I would check in with him to see if he would be willing to attend FPU. To my surprise, in December of 2015, he agreed to go. I couldn't believe it. We found a local church hosting FPU in January of 2016 and we went.
What a difference this class made! It challenged us to do the things we were "kind of" doing. We were "kind of" doing a budget. We were "kind of" applying our extra money from tutoring and my husband's gigs to our debt. This class challenged us to buckle down and finally kick our debt to the curb. We paid the last third of our debt off by September of 2016. It was the fire we needed to fuel the end of our journey.
2. Tithing
Again, this is another counter-intuitive practice we adopted during our journey to debt freedom. Anyone who listens to DR know that he is a Christian who believes in tithing. A tithe is 10% of your income that should go to your local church. This was another challenge from our FPU class. At the time, we didn't have a home church. Instead, we would choose different non-profits to donate to each month. I would recommend this action to anyone in the same boat - to donate to a cause you believe in if you don't have a home church.
Now, we tithe each and every pay period. Ten percent immediately goes to our church. This is simply an act of faith on our part, but once we adopted this practice we never stopped. It truly became part of our walk not only as Christians but it also encouraged us to be more generous human beings.
3. Cash Envelopes
This was yet another practice that was extended as a challenge through FPU...I think you're starting to see a trend here. As a consumer, I didn't really want to be bothered with carrying cash. I thought, "Let's try it. If we hate it, we can go back to using our debit card." So, I ordered these nifty envelopes off Amazon called "Spendvelopes" and divided up our money into different categories.
Over the years, I have not only kept this practice, but I have it down to a science. Each pay period I go to the bank and get cash for the following categories: Groceries, Restaurants (we learned we needed to keep this category separate), Fun Money, Gas, Tithe, Dobby (our beast), Cell Phones, The JuJuBe and Medical Expenses. Before y'all try to rob me for my cash, I usually only carry the necessary envelopes for the day...and there's never very much in the envelopes for a family of three on one teacher's salary!
4. Shopping at ALDI
Such a great spot to shop! I don't typically coupon and shopping at ALDI makes me feel like I don't have to. I'm not anti-couponing, but there are few worse things I can think of than driving all over town to save a couple of dollars. I may be singing a different tune in the future, but for all the times I've tried, couponing has never worked for me. For those of you without an ALDI in your region, there are many other discount grocery stores that are similar!
5. Adopting Frugality
There is frugal. Then there is cheap. Here's the difference: someone who is cheap will settle for the item that costs less no matter what. Someone who is frugal shops their different options and may choose an item that will last longer but still doesn't break the budget. See the difference? I'm not saying we've never been guilty of being cheap. However, we've usually regretted those decisions when we reacted to the "right now" price tag instead of the long term picture.
Frugality, for our household, has given us options. Because we make a conscious effort to be frugal and live debt free, I am able to stay at home and raise our daughter. If we still had consumer debt at all, this would be impossible. Now that we've lived this way for so long, there's no going back. We will always have a long term money plan. We will always have a short term money plan: our budget.
There are more elements to our frugal lifestyle that I will elaborate on in a later post I'm sure, but for now, this is the gist of how being frugal has been a game changer for us.
6. Budgeting
My beautiful friend, the budget. Again, pre-FPU I "kind of" did a budget. I knew what our bills were each month. I mostly knew what went where. I logged into my bank account to see where we spent our money. However, putting it physically down on paper changed it all. In fact, up until this past year, I continued to put our budgets on paper. Now, I use Excel to generate our budget. It took about three months to really get the hang of making a budget, but now it takes a matter of minutes, and it's actually something I love to do.
Is each budget each month absolutely perfect? No. Things pop up. Sometimes money has to be shifted around. The difference here is huge. Before, when I was kind of budgeting, I would've had an oversight that could've made us easily overspend. Now, because I know where all of our money is going, that's not ever an issue.
Thank you guys so much for stopping by! I know this was a lengthy post, but I wanted to share with you all these practices that really helped shape our financial future. Some are so simple but had such a huge impact on us. I hope it helps someone out there! Thanks again!
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