EveryDollar App

On Christmas Eve some lovely friends took us out to dinner and we had a great time, I must say. Although, it was at dinner I found out that Chris had used our credit card that very morning to make a Tim Horton's purchase. gasp I know! I was surprised, too!

Since then, we did talk about it and we recognize that in order to get out of debt we just cannot use that credit card. We have to pretend like it doesn't exist. So, we took our cards and put them away in a sealed envelope. They're in hiding and until they're paid off, that's where they're gonna stay!

Dave Ramsey would tell us to cut them up and never use them again. I'm not willing to go that far... in fact our own financial advisor said to keep them open and the credit limits where they are as they can be used with intentional money-already-down purchases for maintaining my credit score.

Moving on from that, we did decide to make a change in how we budget by trying out Dave Ramsey's " EveryDollar "application. You can certainly use it on your smart phone but since we're home 99% of the time and we don't use data on our phones -- just wifi -- we'll be logging in through our laptops.

I love that the app is free, looks very pretty and seems fairly easy to use. Now typically we've been recording purchases via Excel spreadsheet, but I don't like that only Chris can see the spreadsheet and I like more detail in my budgeting info. So, for example, I wanted to know how much we spent on just food for groceries and not everything and we didn't have that info available to us. He had it all clumped together as one big total for food, toiletries, household stuff, kitty litter, etc. Yes, he could separate it all into categories for me but still... it wouldn't be an easy access thing for both of us. With EveryDollar we can both log it, add transactions, make budgeting changes, see sinking funds (will explain these in another post) and everything else equally and both have control of the budgeting.

If we don't end up liking the app, we'll let you know, but I want to give it a fair shot for January and kinda go from there. I'm more of a pencil and paper kinda girl, but Chris likes his spreadsheets, so this option with DR's app might be a happy medium for us both.

Right now as I look at our budget for January we are putting 48% of our budget towards debt... yup... that's pretty scary when you think about it -- and embarrassing -- but if you don't face your faults and sinful ways how do you expect to change 'em? I encourage you to do the same. You can do this and if you want a little coaching and encouragement just email me! Seriously, no judgment here on my part. I'm so passionate about budgeting that I eat, sleep and drink the subject everyday. LOVE IT!

Also,what's even more exciting it when I was doing some quick calculations on my calculator in bed two nights ago (yes I do a lot of number crunching when I can't sleep) I found a way for us to pay off our debt two months faster than originally planned! I explained it to Chris, yesterday morning, and when he realized where I was going with it, he said, "We can actually pay it off even faster!" It was awesome to hear his input and he was right, we'll actually be 2.5 months ahead once we get the debt snowball rolling. My gut tells me we will be able to pay off FOUR of our debts before the end of 2017! Whoo-hoo! That's gonna be huge! Oh, you guys are just gonna have to get up and do the happy dances with us at the end of each debt pay off! grins

Exciting stuff coming up guys and Chris and I will begin to show you in a little more detail what budgeting this new way  looks like in a few days -- once the new year starts, so stay tuned for that!

We love you guys and I hope this gives you some food for thought about your own financial fitness. I hope you're all looking forward to a fresh budget start in January! Shake off that old fear of facing your debt and put on the armor of God because we're going to fight this battle with you -- and with God on our side!