Tag: banking

The Push/Pull of Saving Money vs Paying Off Debt

Dave Johnson6 Comments

190717

“It’s a teeter-totter. One side can’t go down without the other coming up, and unless you’ve done something horribly wrong and are a really awful playground equipment jockey, you can’t get both sides to come down at the same time.“

___________________________

I’m not the brightest bulb in the knife drawer, so when I talk mathematics, I like to keep it simple enough for even me to understand. So here goes…

Simple math dictates that if you have 10 dollars to spend, you can spend less than 10 dollars, but you certainly can’t spend more.

Am I with me so far? I am? Great! Let’s move on.

If we carry that same analogy forward to how my wife and I used to operate my life, if we got 10 dollars, we would immediately spend that 10 dollars on dumb stuff. Then we would hit a point in the month where we needed additional money for legitimate reasons, but again… we only had that 10 dollars. So we would instead charge things on a credit card. Simple!

Simply stupid.

Listen folks, we didn’t get into our current situation by making smart choices. We made the financial equivalent choice of stepping right into the ring with an MMA champion because we watched a Jackie Chan movie from our couch and thought “it all looked kind of easy.”

Now that we’re over that way of thinking and have firmly placed our life back on track, we don’t have the credit cards anymore. I almost said, “as a fallback,” but that’s like saying, “We don’t have the pit of spikes to catch us if we fall off of this tightrope anymore.”

The 10 dollars we have is now the 10 dollars we have.

In our situation, we had some money in a 401k, but literally no money in a savings account of any kind. So now we have two things that we need to accomplish:

  1. We need to pay off our debt.
  2. We need to put some money into savings.

Dave Ramsey’s approach to this is wildly aggressive. He basically says you should get $1,000 into an emergency savings fund, and then divert every remaining penny to paying off your debt as quickly as possible.

David Bach on the other hand goes for an approach of splitting any funds you have almost 50/50, with half going towards savings until you’ve got 3-6 months worth of salary built up, and the other half going towards debt.

Almost 7 months into this process and I’m still not sure which one I side with.

Read More »

Living the Lake Life Lavishly… for Two Days

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

I could not be more focused on digging out of my financial situation right now, and these types of stories are exactly why. I want to get to a point in my life where not only am I financially secure, but I’m actually so secure that I can share with my friends and family.

Starting Credit Card Debt (01.01.19): $126,310.77
Current Credit Card Debt: $109,045.60
Total Paid Off: $17,265.17
Income Going to Savings: 2%

We had the pleasure of being invited to a house this weekend for a 2 day get-together of several families celebrating the end of our lacrosse season. The house itself was modest to say the least, but the lakeside location was not.

We spent hours on the lake yanking kids around on innertubes, grilling hot dogs in the backyard as we watched the wake lazily lap the dock, chasing frogs, and drinking (far too much) beer as we watched the sun set over the distant pines.

As the weekend progressed and I began to ask a friend about the dude graciously let us borrow his pad for the weekend, I found out it’s not even his main home.

“He’s got several properties,” I was told, “He’s a single guy, so he doesn’t worry too much about keeping them spotless, which is why this place is in need of a coat of paint. It’s also why it’s perfect for 15 lacrosse boys to goof around in without worrying about them wrecking the place. This is really just kind of like one of his bachelor pads, so he often lets us use it to take our boat out.”

Several properties? One of his bachelor pads? Of course my next question had to be, “What does he do for a living?”Read More »