the title of this post is pretty self-explanatory. this is one of our highest goals (second to giving) and probably will be for most of our lives.

i want to start out by saying that paying off debt can be addicting. staying out of debt can be just as addicting. it’s amazingly fun to see such momentum, to feel so much relief, and to feel so free from the bondage of debt.

i don’t know about you, but these feelings of relief or momentum can cause problems for my heart. it causes me to question: would i rather give to someone in need…or fill our tuition fund? 

the problem is, neither one of those things is a wrong choice. it’s certainly wise to plan for expenses and try to stay out of debt. and it’s definitely within reason to contribute a donation to someone in need. it begs the question, how do we choose? my head would choose the savings account every time. often, my heart would as well.

bryan and i have come to the conclusion that we are not going to be successful in staying out of debt unless we’re committed to generosity first.

“honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.” -proverbs 3:9-10

when we give to the Lord first, He fills us up. this principle is not just true with finances, but it is true in every aspect of being a follower of Jesus. He loves for us to lay ourselves at His feet and let Him work through us, not in spite of us. we have personally found this to be true in our lives. when we are generous, which is only because of God’s work in our lives, we feel blessed by God. this is not a blog promising unending financial blessing from God, or even any kind of financial blessing from God. all i’m saying, is that God always seems to meet our needs, especially when we give.

while we are always striving to stay out of debt, we simply won’t consider taking away from our tithe or saying no to a support letter just because we want to lower our debt. it’s just too tempting to be a good idea. : )

goals to stay out of debt in 2011-2012

• pay off $5,500 student loan as quickly as possible, preferably before interest accrues
• increase our mortgage payment
• save cash for a second car
• save 6 months of living expenses in an emergency fund

my husband wants to be a goat farmer in switzerland and live off the land. he doesn’t want to live a conventional life. ever. he doesn’t want to live for his career or money or a big house or new cars or anything the american dream entails. bryan would love to be in fulltime ministry or a missionary or move all around the country with various church plants.

now, you won’t find me complaining when bryan starts some sort of career after he graduates college or when we have a house that isn’t on cinderblocks. but i don’t really want to live a conventional life either. i’m not convinced that means we’re moving to switzerland and purchasing some goats. i’m not even convinced that means we’re going to be fulltime missionaries and live off of support. i like money and stability and america. but i don’t want to live my life for those things and bryan and i agree on that.

in order to keep ourselves accountable to our lifestyle goals, we’ve come up with a financial goal that directly affects all of our other financial goals:

give generously, all the time, no matter how much is in our bank account. 

our idea is that if we’re always giving generously, than we’ll never get fully caught up in making more money, buying bigger and nicer things, or focusing on our careers.

my goal is to be transparent but not prideful. so while the below ideas are indeed things we have implemented into our own lives, i thought it would be fun to point out all the amazing examples that have influenced us to give more generously. we’ve had a lot of good examples.

tithing is a non-negotiable.
this one is exampled by many people we know. whether rich or poor, they are disciplined to tithe. my favorite story about tithing is when my best friends parents were teaching their youngest child about tithing. after he thought he understood he asked: “wait a minute, we give God 10% and then we get to keep all the rest?!”

giving to God’s work is first priority. 
i can’t express how thankful i am to be receiving support from some of my dearest friends. i’ve been support raising for just two months now, but i completely under-estimated how cherished i would feel by receiving support-thank you! (you know who you are!) now that i am on the receiving end, i am all the more eager to give, give, and give some more whenever we get any sort of support letter.

not just money, but time and resources too.
two families stick out in my mind. first, my best friend’s family practically always had someone living with them. i got to know so many college students/random people because there seemed to always be someone new living in there basement. it was awesome!
second, the family of one of my old roommates might be the most modest and generous family i know. they are so quick to borrow out their possessions, be it their truck, their tv, or their vacuum. seriously, they are ridiculous. it makes me jump at the chance to give away our stuff, too!

putting others before ourselves.
i can’t think of anyone in particular that exudes this character, aside from the above people. i’m going to admit, sometimes we just like to challenge ourselves. sometimes, we write a check to someone in need just because it’s a little uncomfortable. sometimes, we offer our home to people just because it might be a little awkward.

in our experience, giving can be challenging, uplifting, frustrating, annoying, and freeing. but i can’t say we’ve ever had “giver’s remorse.” it’s always good for us!

if i could say one thing about our marriage, it’s that it’s kind-of a miracle.

the way bryan and i are designed could not be more different. i was recently talking to a friend of mine about how my marriage was going. i babbled about various struggles or victories we’ve had in marriage for a few minutes, but finally i just told her, we don’t fight about those three things that they warn you about: sex, money and family. we fight because our personalities are so different that we have a lot trouble understanding each other. 


i know opposites attract but really, have you met me and bryan? i think a lot of people are secretly puzzled at how or why we ever got married.

but somehow, it seems to work. we’re head over heels crazy for each other [for the record], and i truly believe God is glorified through our marriage. we’re much better together than separate.

the above may seem like a non-sequitur, but i assure you, this post is about finances.

the kitschy little tagline to this series is “the stories of a couple of youngsters calculating the cost of the future.”

as i told my friend, we don’t really fight about money. we’ve had our disagreements, yes. but regardless of how different we are in method or personality, we have the same mind about the future, that is, we want to invest in it. we don’t want it to hit us like a ton of bricks. we don’t want to be dead and have nothing to show for it. and we don’t want our future to be just about us.

so what does the future look like for us? what goals do we have for ourselves? what do we want our lives to look like in 5 or 10 or 50 years?

[gotcha hooked didn’t i?]

read more next week!

maybe i’m a gossip, but i love knowing the details of peoples lives. that sounds awful. i work for a church, for heaven’s sake. let me clarify. i’m fascinated with people and i’m a copycat. i love knowing all that i can know about people i respect so that i can mimic them and thus become a respectable person. does that sound better?

because of my love for details, i assume everyone else has an intense desire to know everything that is going on in my life. you probably already know that if you read this blog.

so, for that reason and for the reason that personal finance can be just plain hard, i thought i’d give those who are interested some insight into how things roll in this house. and for those that are not interested but can’t take their eyes off their computer screen, i’ll try to make it an enjoyable experience.

i do everything.
just in case you’ve been wondering who keeps track of all our expenses, bills, and receipts in our household, it’s me. bryan is willing to take over if it’s ever a struggle for me (read: if i ever become a budget-monster and start acting like king richard from the robin hood era). but details really aren’t his thing. and details really are my thing, so i really enjoy keeping our check register up to date.

we make decisions together. 
bryan has less opinions then i do about our budget, but we make decisions together. sometimes, i’ll give him an idea of what we need to think about and he tells me what we should do. but a lot of times, i’ll come up with some change to our budget and tell him what i did and he’ll approve. every once and a while, he’ll disapprove because of something i hadn’t thought about and we’ll rework it together.

we don’t have that “jerry rule” that restricts us from spending a certain amount of money without talking to each other. we have so little money that we talk to each other about every extra expense outside of our budget. it’s not really in a, “can i have permission” way, it’s more in a, “this is why we should spend money, do you agree?” way.

excel is free and it’s my best friend.
i use excel for all our budgeting needs. i do fancy stuff like formulas and crap. it’s top of the line, let me tell you.
it’s pretty simple, i have one sheet for our monthly budget, which is inspired by the zero-based budget idea. on this sheet i have all of our expected expenses listed out. throughout the month, i’ll add what we actually spent and our incomes before and after taxes.
the second sheet is a pretty simple check register that i use to balance with our checking account. i balance a little more often than weekly thanks to online banking.

we try to stay one month ahead
we start the beginning of the month with all the money we need. for example, our expenses for august add up to $1,766.84. so we started the month of august with that much in our checking account. this way, we don’t have to wait on my paycheck to have money to pay our bills. throughout the month, my paycheck will refill our checking account and get us ready for the next month.

at this point in the series, i hope i’ve given you some more insight into how we deal with finances in the alsbury family. so far, you may be able be able to conclude that we’re pretty committed to staying out of debt and living within our means. the road is hard, but so rewarding.

dave ramsey preaches the zero-based budget. personally, i highly recommend this idea.

the basic idea is that you “spend” all of your income on paper. when you receive your paycheck, write out where that money needs to go. the order i use is giving (or tithing), bills, sinking funds and cash envelopes. all are equally important, but my order goes from least flexible to most flexible.

for instance, we give a “non-negotiable” amount to our local church
next, our bills are mostly the same every month
then, we have our sinking funds and some are more flexible than others
and then our cash envelopes, and i’m the master fudging our grocery budget : )

subtract all of the above expenses from your net income and your number should be $0.00. thankfully, it’s not a super complicated idea.

it’s also not the only way to do a budget, it’s just our method of choice.

what is a sinking fund?
a sinking fund is a “savings account” that you deposit small monthly amounts for those large irregular expenses such as auto insurance, property tax, christmas, vacations, etc.

here is why i love sinking funds:
they save you money
we save over $200 each year by paying our car insurance in full every six months. if we didn’t use a sinking fund to save up for our car insurance, we would be unprepared to pay this larger amount and have to pay a more expensive monthly price.

they save you from stress
what? christmas is here already? i have seven immediate family members, six in-laws, one niece, four “adopted” family members and one husband. that’s a lot of presents! not to mention mailing out christmas cards, travel expenses, and a slew of other things i always forget that cost money around christmas time. because we save up for the expense of christmas all year round, it’s not nearly as stressful.

they keep it real
sure, it would be great to spend thousands of dollars on vacation every year, but realistically, we can only afford to save $40 per month toward a vacation, which totals up to $480 annually. we can still have a lot of fun with 500 bucks, and it keeps us from having unrealistic expectations for our vacations.

here’s a list of our current sinking funds:
general savings
auto insurance
christmas
eye exams
vacations
home insurance
property tax
birthdays
vehicle tax

note: in the last couple posts i stated that we had $13,000.00 in debt at the beginning of 2009. after going through our financial records and realizing i don’t have much recorded before june of 2009, i’m going to revise that statement. we had approximately $13,000.00 in debt in june of 2008. i thought you might appreciate correct facts! 

here’s what 2008 & 2009 looked like for us, debt snowball style:

2008
in six months (june-december), we paid off roughly $3,000.00 in debt. i didn’t keep great records of our finances personally, and mostly relied on online banking. so this a rough estimate.

january
started the year off with a little over $10,000.00 in debt
fully funded our honeymoon budget with christmas money/bonus
started financial peace university with our connection group
paid off debt

february
started couponing more
received a tax refund
put $1,000 in an emergency fund
paid off debt

march
found out my dad lost his job, God provides for our wedding.
purchased our wedding bands on 0% interest credit: increased our debt by $500
shared all of the above with our connection group
paid off debt

april
worked on our married budget a lot
decided to live off my income after we get married
paid off debt

may
got married!
paid cash for our honeymoon
wrote hundreds of thank you notes to our generous wedding guests
cashed our wedding checks!

june
started married life with about $8,000 in debt
paid my car payment down by $2,000
started saving for tuition

july
paid my car payment down by $900

august
paid off my car (our only interest-accruing loan)!

september
paid off our wedding rings!
paid down our debt to bryan’s parents by $850
ended september with $2,600 in debt

october
bryan’s car requires $2,620.68 in repairs

november
paid for the car repairs with the money we were going to pay off our debt to bryan’s parents
stopped in awe at how precise the numbers were
revised our debt pay off plan
ended november with $2,600 in debt

december
bryan’s parents gave us the gift of being debt-free by forgiving the balance on our loan from them!

by God’s grace, we started 2010 with a plan to move to iowa city, and nothing in our way. we had no debt! hopefully this encourages you that in time and with a lot of effort & hard work, being debt free is possible!

[sorry this post is a week late!]

as i mentioned in my last post, at the beginning of 2009, we had about $13,000.00 in debt. also at this time, we enrolled financial peace university with our connection group.

a few things about financial peace university:

• dave ramsey is the creator/author
• it can be a semester long course, around 13 weeks, there are “quickie courses”
• it usually costs around $100
• it centers around dave ramsey’s “7 baby steps”

i’m going to give a quick summary of our thoughts on those above bullet points.

dave ramsey
first impression: he’s a little nuts. giant scissors and a deer on stage? is this guy for real? bryan doesn’t take well to overly excited people, and dave ramsey’s one of those people. i’m a little more unaffected by the hype but i can understand why some people (my husband included) are a little overwhelmed by him.
my advice: listen to what he has to say and ignore the hype if you must. don’t tune him out completely, even if you’re a little overwhelmed! he has a pretty incredible personal story, and he has a lot of wisdom but hey, he’s an excited guy.

long or short course?
we went through almost every week in the series with our connection group and we were also required to complete a quick version of it for our engagement class. we did have some debt, but we had pretty good foundations for personal finance already, so i think we could have just taken a day-course and called it good.
but, there are many benefits to taking a semester long course, and it’s what i would recommend to any one who needs help with their personal finances. one huge benefit of the longer course is that you have incredible motivation and accountability with your class or small group. every one shares stories each week and it’s so encouraging to be walking through the learning experience together. plus, you can all make inside jokes together about dave.

the cost
to someone struggling with finances, $100 can seem like a small fortune. but i strongly feel that it’s totally worth it. spend the money, it will save you a lot more later. i promise.

the 7 baby steps

1. quickly save $1,000 in a baby emergency fund
2. become debt-free using the “snow-ball method”
3. fully fund your emergency fund (from step 1) with 3-6 months of living expenses
4. contribute 15% of your income to retirement
5. fund your kid’s college educations
6. pay off your mortgage
7. invest money and give a bunch of it away-live like no one else