Financial Views

Firstly I'll start you off with a little background info. I'm a 35-year-old woman who also happens to be a wife of 11 years, mother to two young boys, a current homemaker, a college student, a former Army soldier, and a former bank mortgage employee, et cetera. For my family I also tend to be a chauffeur, errand runner, bill payer, problem solver, project planner, cook, laundress, maid, blah, blah, blah...I'm sure there is more. :-D

I love taking care of the finances and especially love when I come up with a creative way to pay everything without going further in debt. The big thing with me is: DEBT IS BAD! Do we have debt? You better believe it! But we also know as a family that we don't want very much of it anymore. We don't go as far as cutting up every credit card. I believe that it is ok to have a credit card for emergencies and for shopping safely. However, my goal is to get to the point where it is used for true emergencies and/or when we already have the cash to pay off what is spent.

Now you may see me interchange I, me, we, us and so forth. Primarily, I take care of the finances. Hubby hands over all receipts at the end of the day, I take care of the bills, plans for payoff, savings, and anything else to do with our finances. However, that doesn't mean he is in the dark about it. We discuss most of the plans, but he leaves the details and daily work of it to me. I also have all financial info available to him whenever he wants to look at it because I don't believe it is healthy to hide financial info from each other. Does he know everything? No absolutely not! I've found he knows it is being taken care of so he doesn't want to know unless there is something he wants and needs to know if there is money for it...lol.

So here are some basics from my point of view:

1) Debt is BAD! Most people will try to tell you it is normal, but it's not! Debt is ABNORMAL! Being debt-free should be NORMAL!

2) We have one credit card, one HELOC, one truck loan, and one mortgage. I am currently racking up student loans, but those won't become due until around June 2011. Hopefully, something will be paid off by then or I will be back to work.

3) I would like to use this blog to keep track of anything that can be remotely linked to our finances and our plan to "Ditch My Debt".

I'm sure I could add more, but it is getting late. I'll be adding some tickers, graphs, whatever of debt, savings, and net worth along with anything else I can think of over the coming days.