Finances: have a plan

We met with our financial adviser this week and walked out of his office feeling great. I think the biggest thing about money is just having a plan -- and being on the same page as your spouse.

When we first got married, we took Dave Ramsey's FPU class at our church. We've been on and off the wagon with it ever since! We appreciate Dave's plan because it is comprised of a series of "baby steps" We're box checkers, so it works well for us!

So, the new goal is to have a financial meeting every time we get paid. We "spend" the money on paper before it actually gets spent in real life. This is our first week of having an actual written budget, so we'll see how it goes. Our first meeting took five minutes -- the simpler, the better!

The thing you have to remember about budgeting is that it takes a couple of months to actually work. We'll spend the next few weeks really tweaking and eventually we'll hit on a list that works well. Try to not get discouraged if it takes some time for things to line up.

We started out by making a list of annual expenses. We totaled those up and added that figure to our 3-6 month emergency fund goal. That way we can draw from our emergency fund for those once a year expenses and not feel badly, because it was in the plan all along!

The other thing that works well for us is locking up our credit card. Literally. We keep it in our safe and try to use it only for emergencies. It hasn't always been this way, but we've learned over and over again that as soon as you put something on the card, you're tempted to put something else on after it!