Financial Peace for You

Sunday morning January 17, 2016 at 9:00 am at Autumn Ridge Church starts our next Financial Peace University class.

It is taught by Dave Ramsey via DVD. Topics include...

When a Student Is Ready the Teacher Will Appear.

I like to eat Chinese food, mostly for the vegetables. Occasionally I get a good fortune cookie with my meal. I have found you can increase your chances of getting a good one by taking two and then keeping the best one!

I have a whole collection of reasonably good ones in my office. I put them in a large cup. When we are having a boring meeting I pass them around and every one takes one. Kinda breaks up the monotony.

The title of this post is one of the best, "cookie proverbs". It says, "When a Student is Ready the Teacher Will Appear."  I have seen the reality of this many times, for example...

Steps For Getting Out of Debt

Getting out of debt is really pretty simple, yet can be one of the hardest things a family can tackle. The process works best when both husband and wife are working together.

1. Stop borrowing.
2. Save money.
3. Sell things to generate cash.
4. Work overtime or get a second job.
5. Prayer...this really works.

Gazelle Intensity

This is one of my favorite concepts in FPU. Proverbs 6:1-5 talks about “Deliver yourself like the gazelle from the lion...”. Getting out of debt is motivational not mathematical. If it was a matter of math, we wouldn't have gotten into debt in the first place.

Breaking the Chains of Debt

Farmers and their customers may not realize it, but debt is the most aggressively marketed product on the planet. Debt isn't just sold by banks and credit card companies. My reading has shown that many national retail chains make more money on the sale of credit than they do on the merchanise they sell.

If you spread a cultural perspective often enough, loud enough and long enough, the myth becomes accepted as normal. Debt has been marketed to the American cultural so pervasively since the 1970's that to envision living a debt free life requires a complete change in our perspective.

Getting Started on Your Emergency Fund

Getting Started

In FPU, we suggest a starter emergency fund of $1000 and want you to get this in place within a month. You can work overtime, sell things on CriagsList or have a garage sale, to generate cash.

After getting out of debt you then work hard to get the fully funded emergency fund in place.

Why You Need an Emergency Fund

Why You Need An Emergency Fund

It was 2:20 in the morning, and I awoke to a hissing sound. I went to investigate and found 300 gallons of water had leaked from a failed connection under the sink in the kitchen. Water had saturated everything in the kitchen and the basement of our home. We had insurance but our portion of the repair was over $30,000. We did not have an adequate emergency fund so the most of this repair was incorporated into a refinance of our mortgage, which was a major set back to getting our mortgage paid off.

Whether you are living in a rural or urban setting you need an emergency fund

How to Pay Cash for Cars - Lesson 4: Retire Rich & Live Generous

Retire Rich

If you were to to continue to pay yourself a $475 car payment to invest, you would have over $1.6 million in thirty years, and at 40 years it would be a whopping...

How to Pay Cash for Cars - Lesson 3: Drive Free Cars

Drive Free Cars

Continue to think out of the box and things get really wild. You buy a used car for $12,000 and you still have $20,000 sitting in your car fund earning 12% on average. Even if you never contribute another dollar to your car mutual fund you'd be able to buy $12,000 cars every 5 years from now on! The returns you'd earn on that mutual fund will pay for your cars for the rest of your life!

How to Pay Cash for College - Lesson 5 - The Role of Parenting in the College Decision

I wrote "How to Pay Cash for College" for April edition of Autumn Ridge Church Magazine. You can find the condensed version on the church website. They did a great job of publishing the article with pictures and graphics. I had to take out a few examples to fit their space requirements. This is the full article in its entirety. I'll split it over several posts to make for easier reading.  Thanks to Lisa for helping me write and edit this article.

 

The Role of Parenting in the College Decision...