On being grownups...

First off I would like to thank "Pop" and "S", for giving us the Dave Ramsey Books. I wish someone had given me this advice about 7 years ago! We are both really excited about putting it into practice. We thought we were doing ok, plugging along with getting stuff paid off, sort of slowly growing a savings, and trying to get into the first house we could afford. Boy were we off! It's a whole new ball game now. It's time for us to start being real grown ups and get our savings on! We're learning about growing an emergency Fund, IRA's, Mutual Funds, Investing, ... you know, grown up stuff.

Today I finally did the paper work to up the money going into my 401k, after learning how compound interest works I realize that a little bit more can make a HUGE difference later! Also, the plans for getting a house are (by recommendation of the star and smiley face) on temporary hold until we pay off ALL of our debt and get some heftier savings going.

So, new plan is, when he gets back from deployment, to get me/us into an apartment, which may seem counter to saving money, but it's much less than a house and realistically most people don't get the luxury of living with their parents until they are 30 just to save money. (I love them, but I need to be a grown up - this means many different things to me - and we need our own space.) So, a side from that, it's save save save time. We're going to start to 'snowball' our debt as soon as he gets back from this next deployment. He'll have a bank full of sea-pay to obliterate his car loan and then we can get onto the other stuff. Seriously, getting rid of two car payments, student loans, and a credit card is going to open up so much cash for us. We're really excited about it. It'll be worth the wait. That's the basic short term plan. Later we'll add investments and all that jazz. Let's at least finish the books first. :)

In other news, this last weekend was quite probably the last time we'll see our Sailor Monkey for a while. He's going out on his first big deployment. There is a teeny tiny little inkling of a chance that hey might be able to come home this weekend, but I'm not hanging my hat on it. It would be nice though, so we can do some kind of something for our anniversary, even if it's a week early. Also, I won't have his gift until this week and I want to give it to him now, rather than in almost 4 months.

He has promised to blog tonight - with stories! But, it's another long long day so I won't blame him if he doesn't. Last night he fell asleep on his phone so he didn't hear when I called. I got to talk to him this morning at about 4am when he got up to go to work and saw that I had called him a few times.

So that's that.
Yea for us being grown ups and starting to build our financial future. :)
Also, gearing up for his deployment. *deep breath*

And if anyone is interested... http://www.daveramsey.com/