I mentioned last week how Murphy has visited our house. Car problems, house problems and other emergency expenses zapped our emergency fund. Now instead of making massive debt repayments, we’re concentrating on trying to revive our pathetic emergency savings account.
I hate doing that.
That said, I do have something to celebrate. We took care of the emergencies with cash. We’re not going to be paying interest on that auto breakdown (talk about rubbing salt in a wound!). We wouldn’t have done that a year ago. It’s fun to celebrate doing the right thing.
In an attempt not to become completely demoralized in what we thought would be the last three months of our journey to be debt free (now looking like the last five to six months), we’ve joined Financial Peace University.
This is a financial education program put on by Dave Ramsey through a local church. It will be two hours a week for thirteen weeks; A major commitment of time and energy from us. The class is held at various times throughout the year in churches all over America.
Our oldest daughter (turning eleven this week) will be attending with us, and these folks are good enough to provide childcare for our little one. Our oldest is actually looking forward to the program. She told me yesterday in the bookstore, “That Dave Ramsey guy is everywhere mom!”
The class covers thirteen different lessons, each with a different area of financial education from college savings and retirement to charitable giving and insurance. The first hour is a video class and the second is small group work sessions, which should help to keep us intense enough to keep us going. It will also provide a support network of other weird people (the kind who resolve to live without debt) to hang out and swap rice and bean recipes with.
We’re trying to intercede before the winter blues set in and derail our progress. We’re almost there and not giving up, but now nine months into this, the routine is getting a little old and we need to revive it.
Do you need to revive your program? Are you showing signs of regressing or loosing your edge towards beating your debt?
If you’re interested in attending FPU, there’s several ways to join. We found a discounted lifetime family membership for $100. Regular membership is usually a little more expensive than that. There’s also an online-only class. You can view a sample lesson online—it’s fun and engaging, just like we expect the class will be.
I’ll keep you posted about how we do as we go through the program.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Kudo’s on taking the 11-year-old with you to DR classes. I use his “Foundations in Personal Finance” (school curriculum) for my high schoolers and they love it! Sometimes the youth have a lot of wisdom to share with the adults.
You won’t regret taking FPU. Attending this course inspired me to start blogging. I think everyone can get something out of it no matter where they are in their financial journey (or what step!).
Hi Jessica,
I noticed you have very nice images in your posts. How do you find them? Do you get them from the web? If yes how do you know they are not copyrighted? Thanks for any info!
Mark
I had a similar thought to what you expressed in this article when I read your original Murphy story. You may be totally bummed that you pretty much wiped out your emergency fund, but YOU HAD ONE!!!!! I know (from experience) how stressful it is when these things come up, but like you said- at least the car that broke down is paid for, and you didn’t have to borrow to take care of these emergencies. Good for you!!! Looking forward to reading your continued progress. Best wishes.
Thanks everyone for the encouraging comments. I went to the first FPU class light night and had a great time. I’ll post more about that later. My daughter loved it!
As for the question on images, this particular one is from the DebtKid library, so we’ll have to defer that question to the DebtKid himself.
In general, I use opensource images available from opensource libaries in flickr (you’ll have to research image uses and what is allowed and what isn’t). Also, I use The Vintage Moth which is a library of antiuque free vintage artwork, and freedigitalphotos.net which I always provide credit for as provided in their TOS.
I hope that’s helpful to you. Mashable and Problogger both have great info on where to find images for blogging while respecting photographers’ copyrights.