Financial Peace?

Jeremy and I recently went to session 3 of our Financial Peace University class. We have wanted to take this class since before we got married, when we realised that we had very different relationships with money. Neither good or bad, but just different.

The class is a tool to help people get out of debt, make good investments, preparing fro the future and being in a place to give big in the future - or at least that is my paraphrase.

Our church offers the course frequently, but it was always in the time slot that meant Jeremy would not have been able to go because of worship practice and/or church. When we started going to the North campus in the morning we freed up our evenings to be able to learn about getting our money in order!

I love, love, love the teachings of Dave Ramsey and truly believe his principles will bring more peace into our home surrounding the issue of money. The class helps guide our conversations, and is allowing us to realign our values...in terms of having our money better reflect what we say is important to us.

So far our homework assignment shave been pretty easy - but this week we have to work on a budget. This is not a budget for the faint-hearted it will mean that each month we give a name to every penny we are going to earn. Every single cent will be accounted for before we ever see it.
We have always been careful with our money but this way, we will be able to assign it in a way that means we will have to have conversations about how much we will spend on gifts (my guilty pleasure) and gadgets (Jeremy's guilty pleasure) as well as making sure we have a proportionate amount on groceries and our house.
I am really looking forward to feeling more in control of our money in a way that gives us the power to do more with it.

In other news, our new church location and time has meant we are getting up and attem' early enough that we can make real plans because we are out of church before 11am (If you would have told either of us that this would be our schedule, we would have told you you were crazy - we were sleeping until at least noon on Sundays for years) This week we got out of church in tome to see the $5 early show at the movies. We saw 'Hall Pass,' not Probably going to be on the Oscar list next year but we laughed hard and it was good to be in a room that was dark and loud enough that we couldn't hear the torrential rain outside!

Here's hoping the class truly leads us to financial freedom, we'll just have to make sure to allocate enough in our budget for more $5 Sunday movies!