Part Three: Budget, budget, budget
, my wife was about to hear the b-word. There are three things in life I KNOW. 1: Life is short. 2: What goes up must come down. 3: My wife was not going to like this. To my wife, debt is normal. She says it is no big deal to owe money, everybody else does. On the other hand, I kind of freak out knowing I owe money because it is just adding years to how long I will need to keep working. I want to retire early. REAL EARLY! The best way to accumulate money is to shut off the outflow pipe. I wanted our money to really be our money, not GMAC's, Kohl's, Target's, Chase's, CitiBank's, etc. Step one was stopping all credit card usage. DW didn't like this one bit. All I could tell her was "trust me". The credit cards were gathered and sent to exile. Now it was time to figure out how, when, and where our money would go to start paying the creditors. $100K owed including the house. Yes, thankfully our consumer debt
wasn't huge-about $20,000-and our house loan had shrunk to about $80,000 after 10 years of paying on it. I still was very uncomfortable owing on 2 vehicles, 3 credit cards, & the house as I was approaching my 40th b-day. I had never paid extra on the house up until now even though I knew it was a good idea. The money just seemed to disappear each month so never anything extra to send. That was about to stop. After searching for excel budget sheets online for a few days & not really having anything that looked workable, I knew I would have to design my own. Once upon a time I kinda knew excel
, time to re-figure it out.
