Doug and I went to Kansas City this past weekend to see Dave Ramsey speak live. We had taken the FPU course last summer and have done incredibly well on it... But after being away for 3 months, having half of our expenses covered by an expense account & not using our envelopes... Well, we needed a kick in the pants.
And boy, did we get it.
Did we learn anything new? No, not really. But we were able to get our minds back in the "no more debt" frame, which we really needed.
Our general admission seats were quite good. I was able to see Dave's face without looking at the big screens over his head.
Kemper Arena was packed... Seems lots of people are interested in dumping debt...
We got to "meet" Junior, the star of Financial Peace Jr. We picked up the great kids' set for the girls- books, CD, commission & savings charts... I wish I had known about money when I was young. Since my family didn't have any I suppose it was difficult for them to teach us about it...
But what we really went for was the jolt to get us back in gear after being lax for three months. And we got it.
As you may recall, we have had only one vehicle for the past 4 months. While we were in Massachusetts it wasn't a problem. But, since we've been home, it's been difficult. Friends & family have helped out, but there are days that it just doesn't work out.
We had been discussing taking out a small loan, $6000 or so, to get a "decent" vehicle; one that would last a couple years and we could pay off quickly. Well, Dave got us thinking straight again- no more loans! When we got home Doug went to work looking for a vehicle we could pay cash for.
And here it is... Doug is now the (proud?) driver of a 1994 Nissan. It's clean, it runs nice, it has about 160,000 miles on it, and we paid $1600 cash. Oh, it has no radio (but it does have Bose speakers!) and the lock on the door has half a key broken off in it... (But at least there's no radio to steal!)
It should easily last 6 months. By which time it won't have depreciated much more and we will have another $2400 in cash. We'll slowly upgrade until we have our REAL "Dave cars", which, at the moment look a little like this:
Which we will pay cash for, too! (Maybe we'll even go crazy and buy them NEW! OK, not likely, but we will be able to if we want to!!)
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