Wednesday, April 23, 2014

It's an Early April Round Up! I'm too excited to wait!

        Ok.  I have to start off with a rant.  Bear with me.  It's a rant against THE MAN!  The bank man that is.  (To be more clear, the BIG bank man, not the small local banks. haha!)  Want to know how much we have paid in interest on just our three credit cards so far this year??? (keep in mind that two are now paid off) $490.83!!!!!  And it's actually more than that as I couldn't find the interest payments for January on our two Chase cards.  Now...here's the fun part!  Want to know how much interest we have made on our savings account since the beginning of the year!!??  Brace yourselves!  $0.05.  Yep FIVE FREAKING PENNIES.  WHAT A SCAM.  A little lopsided, don't you think??  Wow...thanks bank for my five cents.  Whatever will I do with all that money?  (HEAVY SARCASM)  My daughter finds more money on the ground at Michaels than we make in interest at your bank.  I don't know why this is making me so angry this morning.  But OHHHH I AM SO ANGRY!!!!  I guess it's bringing up lots of previous bad choices from my past with money and credit cards.  Let this be a warning to any and all young people who might be reading- DO NOT FALL VICTIM TO STUDENT CREDIT CARDS!!!!!!!!!  That is where my bad choices started so many years ago.  It only had a $1000 limit, but I think it took me six years to pay it off and there is NO WAY I could tell you what I bought with it.  How stupid is that!??!?  Do you want to know who you're supporting with your interest payments for that leather jacket you just couldn't wait to save up the money for so you put it on your credit card??  You are supporting CEO's of big banks that make MILLIONS every year.  It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it.  Why are interest rates so low on savings accounts??  Could it be that banks don't need our money anymore because credit cards have become so profitable for them?  There is no longer a need to entice customers to put their money in their vaults and so they don't give a you-know-what about what they pay you in interest.  That is just my theory.  They start to care, when you have lots of money, but for the majority of us regular people they could care less.  Please know, I am not trying to demonize bankers...I used to be one!  It's the brass that annoys me.  The people who run their companies with greed in their hearts and then get deemed "too big to fail."  How many CEO's of banks lost their homes in the last crash?  How many lost everything they had?  I would guess 0-1.  Now, how many middle class people lost everything?  Their homes?  Jobs?  I guess it makes me so angry because it makes me see how greedy we have been and I don't like to equate myself with a greedy bank CEO.  Man it sucks to type that!  haha!  But it's true.  How many things have K and I bought because we weren't willing to wait and work to save the money?  I don't know.  Too many.  It ends now...forever.  And so does my rant.  HAHA!
     Boy did I trick you all with my title!!  Not really.  I AM excited about what has happened this month!!!  First, let me tell you about how we messed up.  There was a period of about 10 days or so where we just lost it.  It was a mix of exhaustion and poor planning.  We lost track of spending and while we didn't buy things, we ate out WAY too much.  In wondering what happened, I realized that our tax return had been sitting in our checking account and we had fallen back into old habits and were using it as a "buffer."  It was like a weird sub-conscience thing.  We knew we shouldn't have left that money in the checking account, but it happened and it was a big fat fail.  Anyway, what got us back on track was only what I could describe as a weird "funk" over our house.  Then that night God gave me a dream.  It was me, balancing the check book and looking at things online and realizing that if these other checks cleared that we weren't going to have funds to cover everything.  It was one of the most boring dreams ever, but what was weird was that it was SO REAL.  I was literally messed up for two days about what was real and what was from that dream.  I kept worrying that we didn't have enough money and then finally when I sat down to double check everything, I realized it was all from the Lord.  I took the dream as a warning and also that the Lord wanted me to take another look at our finances.  Why were we sitting on this tax return?
     Finally when K got home from work, we talked about how we had messed up and he made a good point.  He said it just didn't feel right to have this money sitting around when we still had debt to pay off.  We needed to not hoard it.  I don't know why I thought we could keep our tax return.  Sometimes I guess I need to be reminded that it really is ALL God's! (apparently I need reminding of this monthly) "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight," Proverbs 3:5-6.  I love how God used a "funk" and a dream to make our path straight again.  Once we listened and took that money and put it toward debt, it made a HUGE difference both in our debt total and in our enthusiasm for this call that God has placed on our lives this year.  Ok...let's get into some numbers!


  • New debt total as of April 23rd- $3, 971.13
  • Amount paid off since last month- $8429.20!!!!
  • Amount paid off since we started- $18, 428.87!!!!  
Our tax return paid off my Chase card, which was half of the HVAC system.  Then, because of K working his butt off we were able to make a $2500 payment to the other half of the HVAC on the other Chase card!  So insane!! We also "paid back" our tax return the money that we shouldn't have used from it.  It's so ridiculously amazing!  I was just laughing in disbelief when I was paying bills because the Lord is just so good.  His ways are ALWAYS better than my ways.  Let me end with a well known verse among Dave Ramsey peeps because it rings SO TRUE to how we feel right now.  It is Proverbs 6:5- "Free yourself like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler."  We are keeping that gazelle intensity until we are debt free!!!!!!  Praise the Lord!

2 comments:

  1. Whoo hoooo! Only $3900 left??? Thats great! Praise God!

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  2. I just got caught up:) You guys are amazing. Seriously. SO MUCH debt paid off, but more importantly so many great (hard) lessons learned from God and love hearing your new way of thinking in regards to money. It's so refreshing:) Love you!

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