My life had been a series of goals. There were some obvious ones to start with like graduate high school and college – done and done. Sometime during college, I took the Construction Documents Technologist exam offered by the Construction Specifications Institute – passed and got some letters behind my name: CDT. At the time, I thought some letters after my name would help my resume to stand out.
Before graduating college, I took the first of my professional exams: the FE exam. I passed and got even more letters behind my name: EI.
After working for 4 years I was eligible for the Professional Engineering exam. My version of the PE exam would be the Structural I. When I took it, the pass rates were hovering around 35% for first time takers and around 17% for repeat takers. OUCH! I studied for 2 pretty solid months before my son was born and failed enjoyed the studying and exam itself so much I took it a second time. I passed it the second time and got to switch out some of my post-nominal letters: I dropped the EI in favor of PE.
And that’s about it. I grew up and decided I wanted to be a structural engineer. Now I am. Now what?
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Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
We have our home computer hooked into the TV now — in fact, that’s where I’m writing this post (and it’s a little hard on the eyes). Eventually I will want to get a “nettop” to replace the ginormous desktop computer sitting next to the TV, but it will take a while for the finances to allow it.
So why did we really cut out the cable?
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This would be a good photo for some Heath Ledger Joker makeup...
I don’t understand the true hostility for Dave Ramsey. Check out almost any of his youtube videos and you’ll see comments that are really just confusing to me. Maybe they don’t like that he’s a Christian (even though he doesn’t “throw it in anyone’s face”).
Disclosure: He’s really the only financial counselor we have paid attention to so maybe I’m biased. (I mentioned in my last post that we’ve gone through Ramsey’s Financial Peace class before and that we are starting the class again. ) I’ve tried to listen to the others: Suze Orman seems to be too condesending to her callers, Jim Cramer is just out of his damn mind.
I think part of the criticism against Ramsey is that his advice is so simple. At least, that’s what Wikipedia says. I agree, to a point. Like he says, he ’sells’ crock-pots not microwaves. There’s no get-rich-quick scheme, no sure-fire investments. He simply arms the average Joe with the basic financial knowledge that we should have gotten through school. Debt is dumb, check. Use cash to curtail spending, check. Save for large purchases, check. Keep an emergency fund, check. All these are obvious — so why weren’t we doing this on our own?
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Filed under Debt
Tagged as Dave Ramsey, Debt
Back in 2004, we started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Class. After a bit more than 2 years of skrimping and saving and cutting back, we paid off all of our debt. We were debt freeeeeee. We even called Dave’s radio show and screamed. We kept working on his baby steps and didn’t even get all the way through the next one before we “fell off the wagon.” The plan was supposed to work like this: we take all the money we had been putting towards our debts and save up 3 to 6 months of expenses.
It worked for a little while. We got our savings up over 5 digits! But, it got too easy to start sniping off some money from the monthly savings. Grab some of it here, throw some there. Then we started using our credit card a bit again. We had this money available in the budget for this and just paid off the credit card each month. The expenses were not planned each month. They weren’t necessarily impulse buys, but just not planned.
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My life had been a series of goals. There were some obvious ones to start with like graduate high school and college – done and done. Sometime during college, I took the Construction Documents Technologist exam offered by the Construction Specifications Institute – passed and got some letters behind my name: CDT. At the time, I thought some letters after my name would help my resume to stand out.
