Hi lovelies!

Recently Kason and I began Dave Ramsey’s Financial peace together!

I had been wanting to go through it for the past few years, but I knew we would do better if we were in a classroom setting versus us ordering it and doing it at home alone. I personally believe you learn more when you are afforded discussion amongst others who are taking the class as well.

I thought it would be fun to blog about our journey through Financial Peace University to share about our experience and what we learn.

We have currently gone through 3 of the 9 weeks, and goodness we have learned so much already.

We have been married for 7.5 (blissful!) years, and up until this point our definition of “budgeting” was writing down all of our bills. That’s really it, and we honestly didn’t really keep up with them, it was only until I would get worried about money when we would sit down and evaluate what our bills were.

We never looked at what else we were spending, which unfortunately was a lot.

However, that changes now.

Thankfully K and I have always had money in the bank. I use the phrase “had money” VERY loosely. What I mean is that we have never been big spenders on vacations or restaurants, so when tax time came around when we would get a refund it would just go into the bank, it was never used for big expenditures. It would however begin to become depleted over the course of the year because we were simply “living” beyond our income in terms of all those little purchases that add up very quickly and over spending at the grocery store.

This also changes now.

Thanks to the first few weeks of Financial Peace, we have learned that “budgeting” really means telling your money where to go, instead of wondering where it went which is exactly the problem I have had.

If I had a dollar for everytime  I asked “where did it go?!” (especially with the business finances), I’d no joke be able to pay off our newest bill of student loans in one payment.

Sheesh!

So what are we changing? How are going to turn this around?

We are certainly tackling a budget, under Dave’s definition, not our previous one. Dave’s website has downloadable forms for budgeting, but since I am borderline OCD, I created my own thats more custom to what our personal expenses are. We will fill this out every at the beginning of every month.

We are also having weekly “committee” meetings, which just sounds plain old fun and official! (I even created an agenda!) We print off personal and business bank accounts from the previous week, and we discuss what was spent, and chat about upcoming expenses as well.

Through the past 3 weeks, we have come to realize we are being really poor stewards of the money that God blesses us with, and this is a hard pill to swallow when you truly want to live the way God wants you too. However, we are extending ourselves and each other grace, just like Jesus gives to each of us, and moving forward. No looking back.

We can’t change the past, but we can certainly change the future.

xoxo, Tamara