It has been one year since we committed ourselves to the Dave Ramsey plan and it’s time to look and see how we are coming along. Several changes and challenges have taken place over the last year, but as you all know life doesn’t happen like you plan.  You will get surprises and dissapointments, but as long as you know what your goal is, you will get there. So here is what we have accomplished…

Over the last year we have paid off  $20,799 in debt!!!!

Woo Hoo!!!  That is approximately $1733 a month!  Wow!!  I can’t even believe it!

It hasn’t been easy, but it has been much more freeing.  Let me ‘splain…

When we started the DR plan, we were not using credit cards, but had them in case of emergency. We finally decided to shred our credit cards….and there were a LOT!!  Not that we used them all, but we would play the 0% transfer game.  Get a card with 0% and transfer balances.  We ended up with a boatload of cards…many we forgot we had.  There were two cards I wouldn’t give up, though…my Kohl’s card and my business card.

I kept my Kohl’s card because I would get discounts if I used my card.  I always thought, “I’ll just use it and then go right away and pay it off.”  That rarely happened.  It only took one time where I forgot that I had used it and got a late charge.  After that I shredded it.  The late charge basically was more than the percentage off that I had recieved.  Dumb…dumb…dumb…

My business card I kept for business, but found I didn’t use it because I would pay cash for my business purchases.  Having a cash-only company is much better for me.

The other happenings in the last year was that my husband was facing a layoff…again.  We weren’t sure what was going to happen. He was offered a new position in the larger company that acquired his smaller company.  Along with this position, he will receive a company car.  YAY!!  That means selling his car and using that to pay off more debt AND we will have one less car to insure and gas up!

We are hoping to be debt free by this time next year {except for the mortgage}.  That is a good thing since we only have 6 more years before our firstborn heads off to college {need to get to babystep #5 for that savings to begin}….but that is another chapter in our constantly-changing lives.