We are now pretty much done Dave Ramsey's baby step 3. That means that if Steve got hurt or lost his job, we'd have enough cash in our savings account (Tax Free Savings Account...) to hold us for 5 months. Over the next couple of months we'll top that up to a full 6 month savings account, but we kind of put it on hold for a bit to do some much needed spending.
For example, my dear husband allowed me to go out and shop for some clothes!! After having my third baby, nothing fits me anymore. It would be so easy if every pregnancy lasted through the same seasons, and after every time I snapped back quickly to my old body shape. And it would be even nicer if each time was the same shape before, during, and after pregnancy. But no, it's just not like that. So... I had virtually no clothes that I could feel pretty in. Nothing fit me well, and certainly nothing was new, especially after doing the whole Financial Peace University (FPU) for the last year!!
I bought a bunch of new clothes, and then it was Steve's turn. He also bought some new stuff to make him feel great too. Now we are getting back on track though, after a small detour, and we will be much more frugal again to make sure we don't waste everything we've worked so hard to attain!
We are now on Baby Step 3a. What's that, you ask? Well, Dave Ramsey outlines this on his website (but not in the FPU) as the step you can take to save for a down-payment on a house. We currently have a home, but in order to move up to something that will comfortably fit us, (we are sitting at 650 square feet... pretty small,) we want something somewhere around next year. If we want to keep our payments similar, and not feel house poor, we need a much bigger down payment than the equity that we have in this home so far.
Basically, we are now going to push as much as we can into more savings accounts so that we can save for our down payment.
So that's the update... we'll keep you posted!
Oh... and we've now had the privilege of leading a FPU course. We are on week 3, and it has been great! We know that we can expect the participants to make the hard choices because we did it ourselves. We've been there... we are still sort of there. Now that we are coming out on top, it's much easier to keep making those right choices, but it still means denying ourselves what we "want" now, for what we can easily attain later.
