It’s been a little while since my last blog post. Because of that, I need to write something about habits and how they work, or don’t work, for me.
In the meantime, I have something that I’m excited to write about.
This June we finished eliminating our consumer debt by making our final, accelerated car payment. It was a 5 year note and we paid it off in less than 4. That made us very happy. We had also accumulated some other debt that had been slowly retired this spring.
I’m pleased to say that once again, we are back to just our mortgage for personal debt.
I don’t know about you, but I love reading about personal finance. The first personal finance book I remember reading was “The Wealthy Barber” by David Chilton. Published in 1989, I read it in the mid-90s based on a friend’s recommendation. Looking back, I think that I can safely say that I didn’t follow any of the advice.
In the mid 2000s, I got my hands on a copy of David Bach’s “Smart Couples Finish Rich”. I was newly married. We were poor, working at a non-profit for peanuts. I took the advice about making sure to put money away for retirement, but that was about as far as I got.
Over the years, I read most of what Dave Ramsey has published. We’ve used a budget for at least a decade. His snowball concept for paying down debt and his description of financial focus as “gazelle-like intensity” also resonated with me.
Richard Kiyosaki’s books, which I first read in 2015, have significantly shaped my thoughts about debt, work and money.
In the last several years, I’ve ramped up my focus on personal finance. I’ve been reading blogs and books, and I’ve listened to many podcasts.
All that is to say, that I think I’ve had a pretty long and well-rounded history with personal finance information.
As much as they differ, all of those sources agree on one thing: consumer debt is bad and should be avoided at all costs. So it was an especially great feeling to make that last payment.
As satisfying as that last payment was to make, and I did make it at the bank in person to soak up the full satisfaction, the best is yet to come. We’ve had one month of budgeting without any debt service payments. It’s a great feeling to have a little more money. We upped our giving and our investment a little, and a few of our budget categories that were low, but we’re stashing the bulk of it to build up our emergency fund and for a couple of projects around the house that we need to tackle. Once those are complete, the plan is to ramp up the HSA and 401k investments.
Another satisfying part of having flexibility in our budget is the ability to make some on-the-spot decisions. On Monday my wife noticed a Facebook post from our local discount grocery store. They were liquidating their groceries in order to focus on a different aspect of their business. In order to do this, they were reducing their already low prices by 50%.
Knowing that inventory would fly out the door, we headed down as soon as we could. For $74 we got a cart full of groceries that would have cost more than $350 at Walmart prices. It was all food that we would normally buy, like ground beef, bacon and chicken, but this time we stocked up on larger quantities.
A month ago we would have never had the flexibility for that, especially near the end of the month. All of the grocery money would have been spent already.
Less stress and more agility are two reasons to get your personal finances in order as soon as possible. It wasn’t easy for us. For a long time we went without many things that we saw others around us enjoy.
On this side, it is absolutely worth it. Now we have the agility to capitalize on opportunities that require quick action. Here, agility breeds more agility. The great deal on groceries frees up space in future months’ budgets for other opportunities as well.