So I’ve talked to two different companies about a Debt Management Plan now. Both companies went over our budget in detail, and did not really find much that needed to change - that’s good news, at least! Interestingly, the first proposal from both companies would actually result in our total monthly payments going slightly higher [...]

We are current going through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University program. In one of the lessons, Dave says that you are just as protected with a debit card as you are with a credit card. I take issue with this for multiple reasons.

So, it’s been a little over a week since we started this site, and I went through and updated all of our balances.. since my original post, we’ve paid most of the monthly bills, and the new balances are below. We’ve paid of over $3,000 in total debt this month!

I often use the calculators at JavaCalc for any financial calculation needs. Things I like about this site:
* It’s free
* I haven’t found any calculation errors with any of the calculators I’ve used
* You don’t transmit any data to the site — the calculators are Java applets that run locally on your machine.
If you look [...]

As part of our plan to get out of debt, my wife and I have stopped using credit cards. However, being a modern, internet-savvy consumer, most of my purchases are made online, and some of them are not from the safest sellers in the world. I have had four cases in my many years on [...]

Friends of ours keep saying how they are switching from their traditional car insurance (companies such as Farmer’s, State Farm, etc) to the online insurance companies like Geico. Whenever I hear this, I cringe. Many years ago, before we were married, my wife and I were in a very serious car accident. She was driving [...]

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about Prosper, which is a person-to-person finance site. Basically, people ask for a loan, and any number of people can offer a portion of the loan. If enough people are interested to fully fund the loan, the borrower will receive the loan.
As a borrower, it really doesn’t look that [...]

Right now, we are at the point where our monthly expenses plus debt payments are more than the money we are bringing in every month from our regular jobs. Since we’ve started tracking this a few months ago, we’ve always been able to bring in enough additional income to make up the difference, but this [...]

Over at Bible Money Matters, there is a description of Dave Ramsey’s program to “Drive free cars”. Basically, his theory is that if you save enough money in a mutual fund at a 12% return, you can eventually have your cars be completely free. Seems like an interesting concept, but the downside of it for [...]

Welcome to my nightmare. My nightmare is the amount of debt that I’m currently trying to pay off. I’ve decided to share my story and progress with you; there’s really not much here yet, but if you want some background info, please check out the About page.