Financial Friday - Financial Management Day
Every other Friday is pay day (for my husband, that is). It became a natural and necessary thing to balance the checkbook and pay bills on Fridays. It then became a habit, a part of my life balance routine. After reading Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace, and accepting that some big financial changes need to happen around here, I have formally designated Friday as “Financial Friday“.
Financial Friday is my financial management day. I still balance the checkbook and pay bills, but I also work on debt management strategies. Using worksheets in Financial Peace, I am starting to analyze all of our income and spending on a monthly basis. With the gruesome details layed out in front of me on paper, I can see where changes need to be made and I am forced to face the facts.
I’m having a problem though. Debt busting and the ever-popular “snowball method” of debt reduction don’t work well for people who have no money left over at the end of the month. I’ve reduced every bill that I can reduce. Being a stay-at-home mom for the past five years has put a huge burden on our financial situation and we have acquired an enormous pile of debt. Yes, my website business has brought in some income, but not enough. We have more monthly expenses and debt payments than we have income. Many months we rely on credit cards to buy groceries and pay medical expenses… only compounding our problems. (Maybe I should have named this post “Confessions of a WAHM”.) Any way… Enough whining…
One Financial Friday at a time, right?
September 9th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I have been trying to follow what Dave Ramsey teaches also. He has some great ideas but I also have too much month at the end of the money. It is hard to do the debt snowball when my work-at-home income isn’t consistently the same every month. But my husband and I are still striving to do the best we can and strive to be debt free.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
[...] of the ways I’ve dealt with the financial stress is by creating “Financial Friday“. I only deal with finances on Fridays, and once the routine financial chores are out of [...]