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I posted over in the general forum about posting a thread like this, and I got a response from an Administrtor. I think this should be over here in this forum.
I found this forum searching for forums similar to Dave Ramsey's site. I have never joined there because it isn't free. This thread will be long, but please, read on if you'd like. I'm looking for all the help I can get to get myself and my family on track for the long haul.
First of all, I lost both of my parents at a young age. I turned 30 a few months ago, and I have come a long way. My personal financial journey started a long time ago, when I was about 18. Before then, I had no credit and no one would co-sign with me to get anything so I could create credit. One day while in college (full paid scholarship - so no student loan debt) I got an offer from Capitol One to get a card. I jumped on this because I knew it was a way to start my credit. It initially had a $200 limit, that slowly increased over time to $500, $1000, and ending where it has been for years at $3500.
I got a full time job after college, and worked for a few years. I had it made then..My house payment (which was a used trailer) was around $130 a month. It was sitting on my grandmother's land, so I paid no lot rent or anything like that. I had my basic utilties and that was it. A few years passed and my grandmother decided to sell the land. I had to find a place to go, so I started looking at buying a house. I was 22 at the time. This was in 2006 when they were giving away mortgages like candy. I bought a house at the cost of about $130k. I had little debt at the time..maybe $1k on the one CC I have always had with capitol One.
A few years passed and I eventually got marrried. I got my wife one CC as well, also from Capitol One. We did this because she was young and I wanted her to have credit too. Her's started low like mine and eventually hit a cap of $5k. I bought a newer (used) car at the time for $20k and got a very long loan. I think it was around 6 years. Not long after that, we bought my wife a car. She had been driving a vehicle that was her parents' car. We paid $16k for hers, and it was a 6 year loan. So then we had payments of about $700 total a month on these. Shortly after this we had our first child. My wife and I's income was good. We had a house payment of about $1k, and the car payments, plus utilities and minimums on the cards.
For one reason or another, the cards got maxed out. We soon found ourselves in a situation I'm sure many of you have been in or seen. We were up to our necks in debt on these simple three or four things, and it was rough. in 2011, I hit a major windfall that I am not going to discuss, other than to say it was a drawing where I was eligible to be a winner. I won $25k taxes paid. I immediately took that money and paid off the remianing balances on our vehicles, and paid off our CCs. When all was said and done, I believe we had about $1k left, which we quickly spent. We did really good for a while, but we eventually ran both cards all the way up again. So my card was close to maxed out at $3500, and my wife's was maxed out at $4900 or so.
Over the years, we had relied heavily on our tax refunds. Somewhere along the lines, I adjusted my income taxes where not so much is taken out, that way we would have more money throughout the year and not rely on the refund like a savings account.
About a year ago, we had our second child. At that time, we were trying hard to get out of our house which I had bought at 22 years old, and move to a new location where we wanted our oldest child to attend school. Also, We wanted to be closer to work. I made the decison to sell my paid for vehicle that I had bought for $20k, and was lucky enough to get $10K cash for it. I had a previous 2nd vehicle, which I was driving when I bought my used car, so I had something to drive. It is a reliable vehicle so I am good for transortation. It isn't new, but it is no longer about keeping up with the Joneses..lol
I immediately paid off both credit cards again with the money from my car and put the rest in savings, and we were back down to a zero balance. The cards stayed that way up until a few months ago.
We were fortunate enough to have someone buy my house, and I got just enough money to pay it off. Everyone knows how tough this real estate market has been. My final closing papers actually were blank in the fields where it says "$ to seller." So about this time, we found a house in the town where we work and wished to moved to. It was a little more house than we could afford or really wanted to pay, but faced with the situation of having to move all of our stuff to storage, rent a house for a while, and the other inconveniences, we jumped. It was very difficult to get everything in line, and I will say that buying a house this time was much more difficult than the previous one I bought in 2006.
Anyway, we finally got moved in. It exhausted all of our savings and disposable income with fees and other closing costs that we ended up paying. So when we moved in, the house had no blinds, curtains..anything. We had to buy a number of things to get the house livable, plus a few more small things for us as moving in gifts. Nothing serious, maybe a couple hundred dollars. One thing I did end up buying (out of our savings) was a riding lawnmower. This house has a lot more land than we had before, so we had to have that. I was lucky enough to get it for around $500 used, and it was basically new.
So in short, we have some CC debt again. We have about $2500 on my card, and my wife's card has $200. She also has a third card now which is a clothing store card, which has about $700. All in all, that is our only debt. So say about $3500 total in CC debt, plus the mortgage. This house was a lot more house, and my wife and I are both on the mortgage. It is for $213k or so, and our payments are $1300 a month. The difference in house payment from $1k to $1300 is not really an issue, because the differenc is nearly made up in the money we save on gas. We were driving a long way to work where we lived before, so the gas savings have been great.
We have struggled on and off over the years to do a budget. My problem is that I try to overcomplicate it. I can't understand it and I eventually give up on it. But, for the last two months, we have done some things and gotten a new budget worked up to try and better track our money. There has been no unnecessary spending. Our main focus right now is to get the CC's paid off. Just like all the other times we have done this, I have considered cutting them up, but something keeps from doing that. Mainly knowing that if we have an emergency situation we can use them, (until we get our own emergency fund saved up..which has never happened yet.) In reality, we don't really need them anymore as far as a credit score. We have bought our new house and that was one of the main reasons to have a credit score. We don't really need a credit score anymore.
Between my wife and I, we make about $4200 a month. $600 a month goes to daycare. We cannot get around this, and this is for a four week month. Add another week to a month and it goes up. I currently have $1100 in savings, which is also kind of the emergency fund right now. I save $100 a week out of my pay.
One of my problems is my pay. I have a job where I work around 60+ hours a week. I know the thing that every financial person says, and that is if you have any overtime, base your pay off 40 hours and save the rest. That would be fine if it was intermitent, but it isn't the case. I would like to eventually get to that point where I can live off of 40 hours, but it wont be right now or in the near future. I have worked at my job for ten years, and we don't get short time. It is just the way it works. They pay very low wages and give everybody overtime, all the time. I work six days a week. Usually 11 hours a day and 8 on saturday. I have probably worked a 45 hour week twice since I have been there. It has to be understood that this is not the best thing I could want, especially now that I have two children, but it is a very good job. I just have long hours and there is not much I can do about it. I am in a very specialized trade where I can't just go next door and get the same type of job, especially for what I am paid. I've looked, and there is not much out there. In addition, most jobs doing what I do are long hours..just the nature of the trade.
The problem with the pay lies in the fact that it varies. It averages about $700 a week bring home pay, and that is after taxes and putting $100 in savings. If I ever take a saturday off, or leave early during the week to go to an appointment, it cuts my pay substantially. This used to not be an issue much, but now, since we have a larger house payment and other requirements in our budget, it hurts. If I have a $500 paycheck because of a lost saturday, that cuts my budget short by $200 at the enmd of the month. It is the most agravating thing I have ever experienced financial-wise. It is very hard to do a budget and stick to it with this happening. My wife's pay is constant. We don't have to worry about hers flucuating, but mine is all over the place. Sometimes it can even be more, but for the most part it stays around $700.
--------------------------------------------
Now for the issue. For the past few months, we have been barely scraping by. We are trying to stick to our budget like glue, and it has been very difficult. We were lucky that October had five weeks, because I base our budget on four week months. I figured that anty fifth week month would give us an extra amount to put in savings. Unfortunately, we had already gotten behind on the new house payment by simply not watching our budget. We were almost two weeks behind, so I had to go take $1K out of savings to get everything back up to date and all the bills paid on time. There were a few more bills that had gotten a little behind as well. So in short, I would have $2100 in savings right now if I had not taken that $1k out about two months ago to catch up the bills.
Anyway, we barely squeaked by in October. We paid the house payment on time, and even ate spaghettios for a whole week because we did not have any money in the grocery budget. We have $100 a week budgeted for groceries, and we usually spend every bit of it. Included in the grocery budget are diapers and milk for the baby. The baby is not on formula anymore, but is drinking milk by the gallon jug, which is just about as expensive.
I am worried about this month. I know that we will most likely be short. We have something to do on 11/22 where I will probably not be able to work that saturday. That will put us short. And then, that following week is Thanksgiving. I will have two vacation days on my paycheck that week, and no saturday then either. This will drastically cut my pay. I will be down in the $400 range for that week. As you can see, our budget is in place, and we are trying our hardest to utilize it. When the money isn't there, it's hard to do that without taking money out of savings. What this has done is make it almost impossible to save up the money in savings to pay off the CC debt.
---
What can change: I am not going to go over the entire details of our budget, but suffice it to say that there is not anything in there for spending. There is a spot, but it has not had money in it in two months. We have not done anything fun or anything that costs money. It has been a real strain on the family. Our oldest child does not understand why they can't have a small toy every time we go into a store. We can't just stop at a gas station and grab a snack anymore.
The reality is, until we get the CC's paid off, we will be like this. It isn't enjoyable to us and we are starting to argue. My wife and I hardly never fight, but when we do it is about money. It has been difficult for us for the past few months because little things she would like to have for the house, or just simple small purchases are not happening. We simply don't have the money.
I will admit, we have too much house payment. It would have been wiser to buy a smaller house with less land, but we did get what we wanted. The bad news is that even though we got what we wanted, we can't afford to do anything else.
Things will change. Eventually, the baby will be out of daycare, but it will be a few years. God willing, we will get raises at work. I have not had one in about four years, meanwhile the costs of everything else, like healthcare, food, gas, etc. goes up. My wife ususally gets anual raises, but they are not enough to amount to much. What we really need right now is a big raise for either of us, or something to drop from our payments..like the CCs. I cancelled cable about a week ago. We kept our internet service though, because we can watch things on netflix and other cheap services. That is a much better deal than cable. I have also looked into making home made laundry detergent. We have a pretty big budget spot for that, because the four of us go through a lot of clothes.
It is really hard to not go out and just spend money to grab something we want. But, we have to remmeber, that's what kept getting us behind to begin with. Unless we want to be two weeks behind on the house payment again and taking money out of savings ot correct it, we have got to stop spending money like we did. We have done good for the last month, but the shock of not being able to do anything at all is getting rough.
Any copmments, concerns, questions, or criticisms would be appreciated. I want to do this right and get on track, where we can actually start enjoying our new house and our children's youth. This time will pass eventually, and I don't want to look back and see it as nothing but a huge struggle because we were not respsonsible enough to keep an eye on my money.
Oh and one last good thing: I do have a 401K where I contribute the full amount my employer matches. I have close to $30k in there.
I found this forum searching for forums similar to Dave Ramsey's site. I have never joined there because it isn't free. This thread will be long, but please, read on if you'd like. I'm looking for all the help I can get to get myself and my family on track for the long haul.
First of all, I lost both of my parents at a young age. I turned 30 a few months ago, and I have come a long way. My personal financial journey started a long time ago, when I was about 18. Before then, I had no credit and no one would co-sign with me to get anything so I could create credit. One day while in college (full paid scholarship - so no student loan debt) I got an offer from Capitol One to get a card. I jumped on this because I knew it was a way to start my credit. It initially had a $200 limit, that slowly increased over time to $500, $1000, and ending where it has been for years at $3500.
I got a full time job after college, and worked for a few years. I had it made then..My house payment (which was a used trailer) was around $130 a month. It was sitting on my grandmother's land, so I paid no lot rent or anything like that. I had my basic utilties and that was it. A few years passed and my grandmother decided to sell the land. I had to find a place to go, so I started looking at buying a house. I was 22 at the time. This was in 2006 when they were giving away mortgages like candy. I bought a house at the cost of about $130k. I had little debt at the time..maybe $1k on the one CC I have always had with capitol One.
A few years passed and I eventually got marrried. I got my wife one CC as well, also from Capitol One. We did this because she was young and I wanted her to have credit too. Her's started low like mine and eventually hit a cap of $5k. I bought a newer (used) car at the time for $20k and got a very long loan. I think it was around 6 years. Not long after that, we bought my wife a car. She had been driving a vehicle that was her parents' car. We paid $16k for hers, and it was a 6 year loan. So then we had payments of about $700 total a month on these. Shortly after this we had our first child. My wife and I's income was good. We had a house payment of about $1k, and the car payments, plus utilities and minimums on the cards.
For one reason or another, the cards got maxed out. We soon found ourselves in a situation I'm sure many of you have been in or seen. We were up to our necks in debt on these simple three or four things, and it was rough. in 2011, I hit a major windfall that I am not going to discuss, other than to say it was a drawing where I was eligible to be a winner. I won $25k taxes paid. I immediately took that money and paid off the remianing balances on our vehicles, and paid off our CCs. When all was said and done, I believe we had about $1k left, which we quickly spent. We did really good for a while, but we eventually ran both cards all the way up again. So my card was close to maxed out at $3500, and my wife's was maxed out at $4900 or so.
Over the years, we had relied heavily on our tax refunds. Somewhere along the lines, I adjusted my income taxes where not so much is taken out, that way we would have more money throughout the year and not rely on the refund like a savings account.
About a year ago, we had our second child. At that time, we were trying hard to get out of our house which I had bought at 22 years old, and move to a new location where we wanted our oldest child to attend school. Also, We wanted to be closer to work. I made the decison to sell my paid for vehicle that I had bought for $20k, and was lucky enough to get $10K cash for it. I had a previous 2nd vehicle, which I was driving when I bought my used car, so I had something to drive. It is a reliable vehicle so I am good for transortation. It isn't new, but it is no longer about keeping up with the Joneses..lol
I immediately paid off both credit cards again with the money from my car and put the rest in savings, and we were back down to a zero balance. The cards stayed that way up until a few months ago.
We were fortunate enough to have someone buy my house, and I got just enough money to pay it off. Everyone knows how tough this real estate market has been. My final closing papers actually were blank in the fields where it says "$ to seller." So about this time, we found a house in the town where we work and wished to moved to. It was a little more house than we could afford or really wanted to pay, but faced with the situation of having to move all of our stuff to storage, rent a house for a while, and the other inconveniences, we jumped. It was very difficult to get everything in line, and I will say that buying a house this time was much more difficult than the previous one I bought in 2006.
Anyway, we finally got moved in. It exhausted all of our savings and disposable income with fees and other closing costs that we ended up paying. So when we moved in, the house had no blinds, curtains..anything. We had to buy a number of things to get the house livable, plus a few more small things for us as moving in gifts. Nothing serious, maybe a couple hundred dollars. One thing I did end up buying (out of our savings) was a riding lawnmower. This house has a lot more land than we had before, so we had to have that. I was lucky enough to get it for around $500 used, and it was basically new.
So in short, we have some CC debt again. We have about $2500 on my card, and my wife's card has $200. She also has a third card now which is a clothing store card, which has about $700. All in all, that is our only debt. So say about $3500 total in CC debt, plus the mortgage. This house was a lot more house, and my wife and I are both on the mortgage. It is for $213k or so, and our payments are $1300 a month. The difference in house payment from $1k to $1300 is not really an issue, because the differenc is nearly made up in the money we save on gas. We were driving a long way to work where we lived before, so the gas savings have been great.
We have struggled on and off over the years to do a budget. My problem is that I try to overcomplicate it. I can't understand it and I eventually give up on it. But, for the last two months, we have done some things and gotten a new budget worked up to try and better track our money. There has been no unnecessary spending. Our main focus right now is to get the CC's paid off. Just like all the other times we have done this, I have considered cutting them up, but something keeps from doing that. Mainly knowing that if we have an emergency situation we can use them, (until we get our own emergency fund saved up..which has never happened yet.) In reality, we don't really need them anymore as far as a credit score. We have bought our new house and that was one of the main reasons to have a credit score. We don't really need a credit score anymore.
Between my wife and I, we make about $4200 a month. $600 a month goes to daycare. We cannot get around this, and this is for a four week month. Add another week to a month and it goes up. I currently have $1100 in savings, which is also kind of the emergency fund right now. I save $100 a week out of my pay.
One of my problems is my pay. I have a job where I work around 60+ hours a week. I know the thing that every financial person says, and that is if you have any overtime, base your pay off 40 hours and save the rest. That would be fine if it was intermitent, but it isn't the case. I would like to eventually get to that point where I can live off of 40 hours, but it wont be right now or in the near future. I have worked at my job for ten years, and we don't get short time. It is just the way it works. They pay very low wages and give everybody overtime, all the time. I work six days a week. Usually 11 hours a day and 8 on saturday. I have probably worked a 45 hour week twice since I have been there. It has to be understood that this is not the best thing I could want, especially now that I have two children, but it is a very good job. I just have long hours and there is not much I can do about it. I am in a very specialized trade where I can't just go next door and get the same type of job, especially for what I am paid. I've looked, and there is not much out there. In addition, most jobs doing what I do are long hours..just the nature of the trade.
The problem with the pay lies in the fact that it varies. It averages about $700 a week bring home pay, and that is after taxes and putting $100 in savings. If I ever take a saturday off, or leave early during the week to go to an appointment, it cuts my pay substantially. This used to not be an issue much, but now, since we have a larger house payment and other requirements in our budget, it hurts. If I have a $500 paycheck because of a lost saturday, that cuts my budget short by $200 at the enmd of the month. It is the most agravating thing I have ever experienced financial-wise. It is very hard to do a budget and stick to it with this happening. My wife's pay is constant. We don't have to worry about hers flucuating, but mine is all over the place. Sometimes it can even be more, but for the most part it stays around $700.
--------------------------------------------
Now for the issue. For the past few months, we have been barely scraping by. We are trying to stick to our budget like glue, and it has been very difficult. We were lucky that October had five weeks, because I base our budget on four week months. I figured that anty fifth week month would give us an extra amount to put in savings. Unfortunately, we had already gotten behind on the new house payment by simply not watching our budget. We were almost two weeks behind, so I had to go take $1K out of savings to get everything back up to date and all the bills paid on time. There were a few more bills that had gotten a little behind as well. So in short, I would have $2100 in savings right now if I had not taken that $1k out about two months ago to catch up the bills.
Anyway, we barely squeaked by in October. We paid the house payment on time, and even ate spaghettios for a whole week because we did not have any money in the grocery budget. We have $100 a week budgeted for groceries, and we usually spend every bit of it. Included in the grocery budget are diapers and milk for the baby. The baby is not on formula anymore, but is drinking milk by the gallon jug, which is just about as expensive.
I am worried about this month. I know that we will most likely be short. We have something to do on 11/22 where I will probably not be able to work that saturday. That will put us short. And then, that following week is Thanksgiving. I will have two vacation days on my paycheck that week, and no saturday then either. This will drastically cut my pay. I will be down in the $400 range for that week. As you can see, our budget is in place, and we are trying our hardest to utilize it. When the money isn't there, it's hard to do that without taking money out of savings. What this has done is make it almost impossible to save up the money in savings to pay off the CC debt.
---
What can change: I am not going to go over the entire details of our budget, but suffice it to say that there is not anything in there for spending. There is a spot, but it has not had money in it in two months. We have not done anything fun or anything that costs money. It has been a real strain on the family. Our oldest child does not understand why they can't have a small toy every time we go into a store. We can't just stop at a gas station and grab a snack anymore.
The reality is, until we get the CC's paid off, we will be like this. It isn't enjoyable to us and we are starting to argue. My wife and I hardly never fight, but when we do it is about money. It has been difficult for us for the past few months because little things she would like to have for the house, or just simple small purchases are not happening. We simply don't have the money.
I will admit, we have too much house payment. It would have been wiser to buy a smaller house with less land, but we did get what we wanted. The bad news is that even though we got what we wanted, we can't afford to do anything else.
Things will change. Eventually, the baby will be out of daycare, but it will be a few years. God willing, we will get raises at work. I have not had one in about four years, meanwhile the costs of everything else, like healthcare, food, gas, etc. goes up. My wife ususally gets anual raises, but they are not enough to amount to much. What we really need right now is a big raise for either of us, or something to drop from our payments..like the CCs. I cancelled cable about a week ago. We kept our internet service though, because we can watch things on netflix and other cheap services. That is a much better deal than cable. I have also looked into making home made laundry detergent. We have a pretty big budget spot for that, because the four of us go through a lot of clothes.
It is really hard to not go out and just spend money to grab something we want. But, we have to remmeber, that's what kept getting us behind to begin with. Unless we want to be two weeks behind on the house payment again and taking money out of savings ot correct it, we have got to stop spending money like we did. We have done good for the last month, but the shock of not being able to do anything at all is getting rough.
Any copmments, concerns, questions, or criticisms would be appreciated. I want to do this right and get on track, where we can actually start enjoying our new house and our children's youth. This time will pass eventually, and I don't want to look back and see it as nothing but a huge struggle because we were not respsonsible enough to keep an eye on my money.
Oh and one last good thing: I do have a 401K where I contribute the full amount my employer matches. I have close to $30k in there.
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