Thursday, September 18, 2008

Financial Challenge


I just joined a finanical challenge book club- we will be reading Dave Ramsey's The Total Money Makeover.

To balance out my reading and keep me accountable, I plan to post a blog on my personal productivity progress with my life coach book every Tuesday and every Thursday provide an update on my financial book.

This will be a fun adventure!

----------------------------------------------
My first post for the financial challenge is to identify why I'm taking the challenge, what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, and what I hope to gain from the experince.

1) Why are you taking this challenge?
DH and I spending too much money. We have more loans than I care to admit and we dance on the edge of spending more than we make every month.

A few months ago I realized my company was going through a phase that would likely result in people losing their jobs and reality hit me hard that we needed to get things under control and fast!

2) What do you consider to be your strength with money?
While I'm not one to balance to the penny, I do love playing with numbers. I've started tracking how much money DH and I spend in different categories, looking at correlations where certain areas go up and others go down. I like to compare numbers between months and make goals for the next.

3) What you consider your weakness to be?
Spending money on the little things I don't really need is a huge weakness of mine and I was in denial about it for a long time. A candy bar here, a scented soap there, it may only be a dollar and it adds up! After I started seeing where I was putting my money I got a pretty good wake up call.

As far as the weakness DH and I face together- it's that we have different attitudes and ideas about spending money and when you are married money matters have to be a joint effort.


4) What do you expect or hope to learn from this challenge?
I'm looking for motivation mostly. I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do and I need to suck it up and do it. I'm also interested in learning more about investment options.

2 comments:

MJ said...

One of my friends and her husband are doing that financial plan. They love it and have had great success with it!

DEL said...

Great! I was a little nervous spending money on yet another book (it wasn't available at the library) but I've heard really good things about it, so I'm giving it a try.