DebtFREE-Revolution

Last night my father-in-law stopped by again for a quick visit and a sleepover while he is travelling from frozen Indiana to his home in sunny Florida.  Y’all might recall last time he visited, I got treated to the new car and leased car arguement…well last night he made the statement that we supposedly NEED credit to function in today’s American society.

Let me back up to what started this: I asked hubby if his dad had ever seen or read my blog, with the intent of showing off our debt reduction pie chart in the sidebar and maybe sending the subtle message for him to ease up on his strange money advice.  He saw the name “Debt Free Revolution” and made a remark about how he had seen some guy on TV and what that guy said was “not earth-shattering.”  I innocently asked if that guy might have been Dave Ramsey, because Ramsey now has a television show.  When FIL confirmed it, I offered to give him a Dave Ramsey book.

What followed next was not pretty: apparently my father-in-law is a rather harsh critic of Dave Ramsey…AND the concept of a debt free lifestyle!  He firmly believes that cutting up the credit cards, paying them off, and closing those accounts is financial folly.  He used the example of trying to buy a brand new car…which he thinks must be done through financing.  I simply said I have no intention of buying brand new nor financing.

OK, FIL said, if I can pay cash for a car then all the power to me.  But he said I will still need credit for a mortgage, and I tried to tell him I got my mortgage in 2001 with BAD past credit and only one income factored into the equation; zero-down VA loan no less.  I don’t intend to get another mortgage until this one is paid off in full, so his arguement about carrying a house note while trying to get financed for another is moot.  We also intend to have a good sized down payment for the next house (still half a dozen years into the future) so I really don’t anticipate mortgage problems when we do decide to move.

I think the statement FIL made that troubles me the most was that you MUST have a credit card (or cards) AND you “must” carry a balance.  Carry a balance??  At those interest rates?  He advocated rate shopping, which is something my mother also does, but that doesn’t make sense to me.  (Remember I am a little bit of a numbers nerd.)  Why would I want to have money in savings, even if it’s a good money market, then pay almost twice that interest rate to carry a credit card balance?

Honestly, I think the most powerful argument in favor of a debt-free lifestyle is what I just got done dealing with: the repairs on the Pizza Taxi.  One year ago, just before I found Dave Ramsey, $509 in car repairs would have been a major money crisis for us.  We might have put it on a credit card if there was room, or we might have gotten an AER loan (Army Emergency Relief I think) despite how they treated me years ago when my old Bronco blew the engine.  There is simply no way just one short year ago we could have cash flowed these repairs!

Hubby and I briefly discussed it over coffee this morning, and we both agree: We are in MUCH better financial shape now than we were a year ago.  We don’t know his parents’ full financial picture, and we aren’t nosy enough to ask either.  It’s quite possible his parents are doing many times better than we are.  But we are quite pleased with the way are financial future is headed…and that future does not really include credit!

Oh, as a final note, father-in-law said he discussed it with mother-in-law…and I am no longer allowed to ask for appliances or furniture as presents.  I am supposed to ask for something more personal, nto practical.  There goes the dryer idea…

OK, hopefully I am done with the repair bills on the Pizza Taxi for now.  Here’s the total financial damage for this episode:

• Tow truck, Sunday night: $55
• New battery (75 month) $76
• Replace serpentine belt and fuel filter: $153
• “Remanufactured” alternator: $133
• Replace aleternator (labor): $92

Total cost over the past 48 hours is $509 and I think I have run out of electrical parts to replace LOL  To put it all in perspective, hubby’s truck note is $489 a month.  Since I paid the Pizza Taxi off back in January, I have paid out $509 these past two days plus another $538 back in May to totally replace the brakes on all four wheels…STILL cheaper than a car note!

The Pizza Taxi is still down…in fact it ironically broke down on the way home from work last night right in front of Domino’s, my old employer.  For all you mechanic-types out there, here’s what it is doing:

• The battery light flickers on and off on the dash
• The other dash lights go out (can’t see spedometer)
• the airbag light flickers on and off
• the low fuel light flickers on and off, even though it still  has half a tank
• the clock speeds up
• the check engine light flickers on and off (AKA the “idiot” light because it never really tells you anything)
• the headlights dim until they are almost nonexistant
• turn signals and spedometer stop working

By the time it gets to the last symptom, it is about to die.  This is not an immediate problem, as once again the trouble didn’t start until I was driving back from my 2nd delivery.  My coworkers had all kinds of theories and opinions last night, and of course no two could agree.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they ended up getting a betting pool going on what is actually wrong with the Pizza Taxi, just because the “symptoms” are so odd.  Theories include the alternator (even though the mechanic checked it yesterday), the voltage regulator, a short in the fuse box, serpentine belt not tightened enough (it was replaced yesterday), and my personal theory, gremlins under the hood.  I’m stumped and waiting for my mechanic to call me back.

This is costing me more than just the totals wracked up on my receipts, which include $76 for a new battery and $153 for the serpentine belt and fuel filter change yesterday.  Both Sunday night and last night I couldn’t finish my shifts, and both nights tips were good!  I think that is the part that frustrates me the most … I really do want to get more hours in while I am on semester break.

The repair bills themselves really don’t bother me, since I consider maintenance to be part of owning a vehicle.  When you take into account how much I have driven the Pizza Taxi this year, it isn’t even a significant amount of repair or maintenance costs compared to the extra income I’ve brought home from delivering pizzas.  I replaced my brakes in May ($538), and now this ($229 and counting) … other than that the only expenses have been oil changes because Fords are picky about having the oil changed on schedule.  This is reducing the amount we will put extra on the truck note this month, but so far have not come near needing to touch our emergency fund.

So time for me to quit babbling and go get another cup of coffee.  I welcome y’all’s thoughts, opinions, advice, and commiseration on this one, because having car trouble SUCKS, especially when you are a pizza delivery driver!

I am a little riled tonight…my beloved and trusty Pizza Taxi, a 2000 Ford Escort ZX2 5-speed stick shift, DIED out on a delivery while at work!  I’ve had this car for 6 years now and never had a breakdown, so I guess I just got used to it being 100% reliable.

On my 2nd delivery of the night, I noticed the battery light flickering on.  Each delivery it stayed on a little longer each time, and just before leaving on my 5th run for the night I made the comment to my boss, “I hope my battery holds out for this one,” since it was out in the very far corner of our delivery area.  The car died about half a mile before I reached the customer’s house, and I ended up calling my boss to come rescue me.  Good thing hubby got me my own cell phone last weekend!

So I ended up using my tip money from last night and tonight for a tow truck to get the poor pizza taxi home.  Apparently I am not the only employee at the pizza place who has needed a tow, since two of my coworkers both recommended a specific company which turned out to be $30 cheaper than the first one I called going through the phone book.

Tomorrow I have to replace the battery.  When I peered under the hood to do a cursory (and cussing) check for a potential loose battery cable or gremlin, I noticed the brand was AC Delco Motorcraft (which Ford uses) and could not read any form of a date on that battery.  Thinking back, I cannot recall ever replacing the battery…which means it is probably the factory original one in there.  I am hoping fervently that the problem is NOT in the alternator, since a battery is much less expensive than replacing that.  While I am at it, the pizza taxi is due for an oil change and fuel filter change, so why not kill three birds with one stone?  Since I have to work tomorrow evening, that means I have to set my alarm clock…on semester break!  Ugh.

Hubby is still down in Florida due to the weather, and my family finally made it up to Indiana (and their 14 inches of snow) this morning, so the only ones I have to vent with are the dog who doesn’t understand, the three cats who don’t care, and y’all here on my blog…

OK, those of y’all who have been following things for the last six months know hubby was the Reluctant Spouse, and only partially got on board back in august…well this morning he said when he gets home from visiting his family this weekend he will watch every single video on FPU Online and start listening to the Dave Ramsey radio show when he can!

There are two things behind this: one, he is back home with all his friends and sees how they are struggling paycheck-to-paycheck, even though most of them now make more money than he does,

and two: He wants to own the rights to a gaming convention that he always went to before it folded last year. When he told me the rights-holder is only asking $250 for it, I told him to pull the money out of his account and just buy it…after trying to bargain the guy down to $200 LOL The whole idea that $200-250 is no longer a huge amount of money to us, has really been an eye-opener for him.

So if y’all don’t hear from me on Sunday or Monday…we’re cramming all the FPU vids into hubby’s head until he is as “fanatical” as I am!  Saturday (tomorrow) is of course out for posting thanks to the family invasion I mentioned in my previous post, so it may be until Tuesday before y’all hear from me.  So happy weekend to y’all, and hope it is more sane for you than it will be for me.

So finals are finally over, and here I sit today wondering how I end up with so much unwanted drama that I never saw coming.  Here’s the brief version: my ex-husband is coming down to pick our son up for his winter break from school.  No problem, this has been done before…except my mom is coming along so she can spend some time with me.  Which means I will end up spending more time with the ex than I really want to.  It also means I may have to feed a whole horde of folks, because the ex-husband is bringing his current wife, her daughter, my mom, and the three kids my mom adopted last year.  Added all up that is four teenagers, one eight year old, and three adults.  Good thing I set a good sized beef roast out to thaw before I knew they were all coming down.

The worst part of it is I didn’t hear any of this directly from my mother or my ex.  My ex told my son who all was coming down to pick him up.  When I asked my mom for confirmation, she claims this is the only way she can spend time with me because I made the decision back over the summer I didn’t want to travel this month.  I was supposed to go up to Indiana for Thanksgiving, but hubby couldn’t get a mileage pass to travel, there was a winter storm forecast for the region, and hubby had just gotten back from Korea and didn’t like the thought of spending eight hours each way in a vehicle through possibly bad weather.

At times, I am envious of my brother, who lives out in Arizona and is only obligated to visit once every five years.  I haven’t had a Christmas in my own house since I lived in Texas back when the ex and I were still married, which puts it about 1992 or 1993.  It’s a running joke in our family that mom always knows for sure I’m coming up to visit if three things happen: gas prices jump at least a dime per gallon, there’s a winter storm forecast, and that little rose bush I gave her for Mother’s Day years ago tries (or succeeds) to bloom.

Which brings up another point: it has become very expensive to travel all around the country to visit relatives every single holiday!  Hubby’s family lives in Florida (he’s visiting them now), my family lives mostly in Indiana, and we live here in the middle in Tennessee.  I’ve got extended family in Missouri, Texas, Colorado, plus my brother in Arizona, all whom I haven’t seen in a few years at least.  None of them fuss if I miss or skip a holiday.

There’s really no point to this post other than a place for me to vent about the “invasion” tomorrow and what a pain and stress all this expected travel ends up placing on us.  So if any of y’all want to join in and vent a bit also, feel free.  Sometimes it helps to just commiserate together.  And I am seriously thinking of volunteering to go into work early tomorrow…just so I don’t have to spend too much time around my ex.

As part of the “12 Days of Christmas, PF Blogging Style,” I have today, Day Three.  Hum a few warm-up notes and sing along with me:

“And on the third day of Christmas, I gave to hubby, THREE PAID CARDS!”

Yup, we have paid off all three credit cards we had.  The accounts are down to zero, and will not be resurrected if you ask me.  So, how did I do it?

The absolute best tool for paying off the credit cards is getting on an accurate working budget!  Writing down our income and expenses proved to me that we made enough money to pay all our bills (which I didn’t think it could) and that I had been wasting money on who-knows-what.  Once I had the written budget (I put my budget on a dry erase board next to my desk) I could allocate money to get rid of debt!

It helps that I got onto the Dave Ramsey program almost a year ago, right after Christmas of 2006.  The credit cards were numbers three, four, and five on our debt snowball list, so I had to finish off the last of my car note and a small personal line-of-credit at my credit union before I got to them.  I took care of those in January and the first week of February, then rolled up my sleeves and set to work on the credit cards.

The first one, Chase MasterCard was very easy to kill off: it died by “the sword of the income tax return.”  Chase honestly never knew what hit them, it was over so quick.

The second one, American Express Blue Card, DID know what was happening to them.  It took me from March to June to kill them off, and they went kicking and screaming the whole time.  American Express has two little nasty habits that make me want to NEVER do business with them again: the first was moving the due date around.  For most of the time we had that card, the due date was the 22nd of the month.  When I sent them a larger than normal payment in March, they upped my due date to the 20th, even though it was not a weekend if I remember correctly.  For April they bumped the due date up to the 18th.  As they were moving my due date, they still mailed the statements at the same time, giving me a shorter time to send in my payments.

The other nasty little trick American Express pulled on us was double-cycle billing, which means even after I brought the balance down to zero in May, it rose again like a zombie from one of the “Living Dead” movies in June.  When I asked them why, they said it was in the fine print that we were on double-cycle billing, which means they were charging us for interest from the month I had already paid!

By the time we got to the last credit card, an AAFES Star Card (military store credit card), I discovered the genius of Dave Ramsey’s snowball method: we had a lot of extra money in the month!  So after talking to hubby and extracting a promise from him to not use the cards again (he was still not sold on the Dave Ramsey plan yet) I simply wrote out a check for the entire balance due.  WOW that still feels good to this day.  It was “only” about $778 at that point .. but I just paid it.  Boom, just like that.  (Can y’all tell I am still loving that?)  That was July 2nd, right before I started my blog :)  and what a way to celebrate Independence Day for me.

So here it is, almost Christmas time and almost a full year of debt reduction.  Y’all can see by my little chart in the sidebar I have been making progress on our last debt, hubby’s truck note.  We can’t be debt free for Christams,  but we are credit card free!  And just yesterday, hubby was telling me how happy he is that I got onto a good sound financial plan, and how easy life is without all that debt hanging over our heads.  Last week his First Sergeant offered him permissive TDY, which is basically free leave, and he was able to take it and drive to Florida last night to see his family…because we have extra money in our budget.  We have that extra money because we have broken loose of the chains of credit card debt (and most other debt by now).  Can y’all imagine how much easier our financial life will be once we finish paying off the truck note and have no debt other than our mortgage??  Hubby and I can, and it looks GOOD!

Give it a try yourselves: make the budget, live by the budget, pay off those pesky credit cards…and next year YOU will be singing this song with us.  And here’s the first two days of Christmas in this series (i’ll wrap it up next week with a link to all of them):

• 1st Day of Christmas: The Best Way to Manage Money by Lynnae at Being Frugal.net.
• 2nd Day of Christmas: Two Guaranteed Ways to Financial Freedom at Credit Withdrawal.
• Tomorrow, Day 4 is over at Plonkee Money!

OK, still muddling through studying for finals here, but I have signed up to help fellow M-Network member Lynnae from Being Frugal (dot NET) with a project for her blog: the 12 Days of Christmas, done personal finance blogging style.  She’s kicking it off Monday on her blog (I’ll add the link when it goes live) and I am doing day three, which is “three French hens” in the song but doing it the Debt Free Revolution style makes it THREE PAID CARDS … as in three credit cards completely paid off here :)  I am living proof, folks: it CAN be done.  So tune in here on Wednesday for my story of just how I’ve done it!

Some random notes from my stressed and hectic life:

• Congress has kindly upped my VA Disability payment effective 1 December 2007 by a whopping $13 per month…the truck note is now in true danger!  LOL
• Congress upped the GI Bill stipend, but I can’t find the amount right now, but that goes into effect 1 January 2008.  Wow, it feels funny to type 2008 even though that is now only 3 weeks away.
• Hubby says he will go 100% Dave Ramsey budget starting with his mid-month pay!  Wooohooo!
• The truck note is down to $8051.16 … Can y’all tell I am now counting down?  They processed this last payment correctly after last week’s tussle about principle versus interest, and there is another payment out there in between my bill pay and their processing center, so it will go down again either tonight or Monday.
• I have a physics final Monday night, my organic chemistry final Tuesday afternoon, and the final lab report due for organic chem lab on Thursday.  Then I am free to pick up another night delivering pizzas at work.
• We increased a bill, if you can believe that one!  Last weekend we added two cell phones and lines to our bill since hubby took back his cell phone so he can keep in touch at work, and I need a cell phone to find houses at night delivering pizzas, and son has been begging (and cleaning things) for a cell phone for him.
• My delivery income has actually decresed, because the owner is running a coupon for a free pizza…but it is for pick-up only.  I can understand he won’t deliver free pizzas, but man it’s really affecting the delivery side of the business.  Hopefully new customers who try to free pizza like it enough to order more (and why not, when it’s been voted Best Pizza in Clarksville?) and the weather is turning icky enough for people to prefer delivery rather than venturing out to pick up food.

That about covers all my bases … and y’all should see the size of coffee cup hubby grabbed for me when I finally rolled out of bed this morning!  LOL  I sure need it today.