Month: September 2013

The Start of Our Debt Snowball

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

Debt Snowball

It’s probably no surprise that before J and I get married we are trying to take a good hard look into our finances.  I used to say while we were dating (not soon after we started dating because that would have been weird) that I was going to marry his debt and he was going to marry my debt.  He used to hate that because he thought that it was a bad thing for his truck payment and little credit card bill, but I would always assure him that it was not bad – it was just the truth.  I had several credit card and one big school loan that he was going to say I do to.

Yes, I know that debt incurred prior to marriage is technically separate.  His name was nowhere on my school loan and mine was not on his truck loan; however, it is still ours.  We are getting married.  We are combining incomes, which means that after we are married and the payments we make on our separate debts are now paid with marital income.

Anyway, back to what this post is suppose to be about.  J and I would sit down about once a month and go through our budget, we talked about how to pay our bills and this idea of paying off our debt.  My Dad told us about Dave Ramsey and told us not to reinvent the wheel – well, J already knew about it and had read the book; I had heard of Dave Ramsey, but that’s about as much thought as I had given it.  So, fast forward and J and I are taking FInancial Peace University together, before we get married.

Honestly, I think it is a genius idea.  We keep talking about getting our marriage off to a good start and statistics show that the number one cause of marriage problems is money.  So why not agree on the number one problem area before we even tie the knot?

Last week we developed our new budget and I talked about it here.  This week we started looking into all of our debt and devised our debt snowball plan.  I have to tell you that the idea of combining payments to knock off debt one-by-one is a pretty sweet feeling.  We only have 8 separate debts and when we were writing down what the new payment would be on no. 8, it was a satisfying feeling.

I know that we are not there yet and at the rate we are going, meaning if we are unable to put any additional money into our first debt payoff it will take us approximately 18 months to pay it off.  Not because it is a high-valued debt but because we are only able to pay so much.  But the good news is that we are able to pay on every debt.

This feeling is good and the place we are in is even better.  I am excited about our future together as a team.  The thought of being debt free and saving for a home is pretty priceless.

Cheers! 

10 Bad Working From Home Habits to Kick

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

bad work habits to break

Lately I have had the pleasure to work from home some and I found myself picking up some bad habits.  Let’s face it, we all have bad work habits and I am no longer in denial about mine.

Here we go, 10 habits to break when you are working from home:

1) turning on TV.
2) sitting on the couch, not at a table or desk.
3) not setting alarm as if you had to go into an office.
4) not logging onto your work center at 8:00 so you can see everything that you need to get done for the day.
5) getting distracted by other sources of entertainment, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, or OMG! Yahoo
6) spending time during the workday doing laundry or other household chores
7) not forcing yourself to continue working until 5:00 or the agreed upon quitting time from your boss.
8) getting annoyed with people back at the main office – you do not know what their day is like and therefore, cannot get upset when they have you do something that only takes 30 seconds and they could have done it in the time they took to send an email asking you to do it… yes this one might be a bit passive aggressive, but it’s a habit to break.
9) procrastinating
10) taking too many breaks

I know I am guilty of some all of these from time to time.  I’ve made it a priority to refocus my energy and pretend that I am in the swankiest office.

Cheers!

Bridal Shower

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

bridalshower-tiara

A few weeks ago my absolutely, wonderful, amazing family threw me the BEST bridal shower in my hometown.  There were over the 100 photos taken that day, don’t worry I’ll spare you and here is only a few.

bridal showerbridal showerbridalbridal shower

Organize Your Desktop, simple easy steps with a template

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

organize your desktop

I have seen on Pinterest a few organizing tips to cleaning up your desktop icons.  I thought it was genius, but there was not a template that quite made a place for all of my icons.  Of course, I decided to create one on my own, because that’s just what I do while J and I watch TV.

First, I looked at my desktop and arranged them in categories that made sense to me.

Second, I created an image in Photoshop with labels for all of my categories.  My favorite is the Money one, mainly because I used dollar signs…

Third, any icons that did not fit into my new categories got deleted from the desktop.  My thoughts were that if I didn’t need a category then I did not need an icon junking up my screen, simple as that.

I have added the image I used and an image with the category titles removed.  Hope you find it useful!

organize your desktop organize your desktop

Cheers!

 

Developing A Budget As A Couple

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

tips for developing a budget

It’s no lie that finding someone, dating them, and then planning a wedding with them can be a bit difficult at times.  Combining two ways of doing just about everything to create one unified way can be frustrating and asks for a lot of compromise from both people.  That is the same for when you are asking two people with separate incomes, separate budgets, separate bills, separate bank accounts (wow! that’s a lot of separation) to come together to make a single family unit.

A team approach is the best.  You have to realize that the debts are no longer his and hers, they are now yours.  You have to plan to payoff the debts together and in a way that works best for the family unit.

Developing a budget is key.  As Dave Ramsey (roughly) says “You have to spend every dollar on paper before you actually spend it.”  That means calculating both incomes, all payment of bills, and putting aside some to savings.

As you might guess, J and I have been taking Financial Peace University.  While we aren’t finished with the classes yet, we are making progress.  Recently, we sat down to make a new budget that worked for us.  We kept finding reasons to not commit to a budget, but then we weren’t getting anywhere.  Here were our excuses reasons:

1) we just moved and had a lot of unusual spending – such as our final bills for our old utilities, moving truck, extra gas for driving further than normal, etc…

2) weren’t sure what J’s new monthly income after taxes and 401(k) draws was going to be

3) I switched to salary with my job and again, we weren’t sure what my monthly net income would be.

See, reasons.

tips for developing a budget

We were tired of reasons and it was time to get started.  I took Dave Ramsey’s forms and made a basic template using our monthly bills that we can hang on our fridge to talk about when monthly bills come in and get paid.

Cheers!

August Wrap Up and September Goals

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

August Wrap Up and September Goals

I cannot believe August is over and it’s time to create my September Goals.

I feel like it just started and we were in the process of packing up our lives to move across the state.  Pretty crazy how time flies when you’re having fun… unpacking boxes!  When I talked about my August goals I was pretty ambitious for someone who still had a lot of wedding planning to tackle, boxes to unpack, and friends to make.

1) get settled into our new home – 70/30

We are in the new home, we even have pictures on one of the walls.  However, there are still boxes in the guest bedroom that need to be unpacked – only 3 left and we have a lot of pictures to hang.  So, I would say we are about 70% there.

2) consistently write 3-4 posts a week – PASS

I believe I am averaging 4 posts a week.  I have even developed a posting schedule – Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.  I take the weekends and Wednesdays off – I think that’s a good mix.  Well, except for today – I decided to post this Wednesday and I am allowed to do that.

3) create a routine between all of my creative outlets (blog and etsy), work, and homelife – 90/10

I have created a pretty good routine for everything.  I work until 5-6 every day, then we have dinner and spend time together.  About 8:00 is when I start blogging or reading articles of interest.  I have had to take a cutback on my Etsy shop, not because it was growing like wildfire or anything, but we are trying to pay down debt and we decided that it would probably be best not to spend any more money on something until our little credit cards are paid down… sad face.

4) make progress on wedding planning – order the invites and finalize our favor idea – PASS

I have the wedding invites sitting next to me and they are gorgeous!  I love them oh-so-much!  I have the favor idea finalized and even have it marked in the calendar when I need to start buying everything for it.  The favor is SO me with Justin sprinkled in on top!  It’s going to be perfect for us.

5) design organizing templates – I’m going to say PASS

I have a budget template and a desktop template coming your way in the next few days… be on the lookout for that!

I think I am in a pretty good place for August.  Now, onto September goals.

1) Work on my side hustle to make some extra money
2) Purchase the big ticket items for our favors at the wedding
3) Pay $200 towards our smallest debt to make a dent
4) Finish funding our emergency fund
5) Knock out ¼ of the remaining Dave Ramsey videos

A lot to do with money, guess you can figure out where my mindset is lately.

Cheers!

Easy Cinnamon-Sugar Pull Apart Bread

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®

pull apart bread recipe

One of my favorite desserts, breakfasts or snacks ever is pull apart bread.  The smell of fresh baked bread reminds me of summers at my grandparents when I was a little girl.  My Aunt and I would get together, wear our cutesy aprons, and spend the day making homemade bread and cinnamon rolls.  I have a lot of memories sitting around my grandma’s kitchen table kneading bread, rolling out dough…

Nowadays, I don’t have the time or the patience most weekends to make homemade pull apart bread.  So, when I can cheat and have fresh baked from a can – I do!

This past weekend I pulled out an old favorite for breakfast.

The pictures do NOT do this gooey, sugar filled dough any justice.  It was delicious!

Here’s what you need to make your own cinnamon-sugar pull apart bread with icing:

Pull Apart Bread:

1 can biscuisits, each biscuit cut into fourths
1 c. sugar
cinnamon
¼ c. brown sugar
¼ c. butter

Icing:

1 c. powdered sugar
½ tsp. vanilla
1-2 T milk

pull apart bread recipe

Preheat oven to 475 or as per the directions on the biscuits and spray a round cake pan with cooking spray.  Mix the sugar, cinnamon and brown sugar in a bowl.  Melt butter and let cool for a few seconds (that way you will not burn your hands).  Dip a piece of dough into the butter  and dredge in the sugar mixture.  Shake of excess and place in pan.  Bake per directions on the cannister, mine took about 20 minutes.

Mix the icing ingredients together.  The more milk you add, the thinner the icing will be.  I used mine as a drizzle, so I added the full 2 Tablespoons.  Drizzle the icing over the bread.

pull apart bread recipe

Enjoy!

Our Love Story : How We Met

Posted on by Meredith Rines, MBA, CFP®
our love story
DColemanPhotography

With only two months until our wedding day, I thought it would be neat to share how J and I met.

J and I do not really have a typically meeting story, or maybe we do.  I don’t know, it’s different than any other guy I dated in the past, which might be why it worked out – again, I do not know.  I’m thinking too much into it.  All I know is that I love telling the the first time we met story.  J likes to tell the how we met story, but the other one is my favorite part.

We first met at a local bar on the South Side of Springfield on a Friday night.  J was new in town and had a few friends visiting from St. Louis.  I was going out with my roommate to meet up with another friend for a birthday party.  J’s friend from out of town asked to buy me and a friend a drink and no offense to him, he was not my type.  I know they always say don’t judge a book by its cover, but it was hard.  The V-neck shirt, glaring white teeth as in Ross from Friends in the episode where he bleaches his teeth so white that they glowed in a black light kind of white.  He was just not for me and I was tired, so I politely turned down the offer.  My friend took him up on it and so then they decided to introduce me to J.  J was feeling pretty good that night, if you know what I mean.  He doesn’t remember meeting me and all I remember is this horrible dancer who looked like he would be in a lot pain the next day

.

Fast forward to the next day when J’s friend and my friend conspired to meet up while downtown.  After a night of dancing with my date the five us decided to head to the local Steak-N-Shake for some grub.  I started talking to J who was in much better shape than the night before.  We talked about food, the bootheel of Missouri, which will always hold a soft place in my heart.  I decided that he was pretty decent and much better than my actual date, so I tried to be cool by asking for his number to go to breakfast one morning at the local hot spot.

Two weeks went by and my friend asked for his number to go out with us that night.  I decided to beat her to the punch and texted him first… I was so slick!  He was busy or had to get up early the next day, I don’t really remember his reasoning, but I called him boring and that started the conversation from there.

He finally asked me to dinner on a Monday night, he picked me up in his shiny, red truck and we headed out for steak.  We talked, laughed, and he wasn’t completely turned off by my mess-of-a-bathroom when he dropped me off, but still texted me again – whew!

That was it, we had a few moments of uncertainty along the way or really I had one moment and the thought of J not being around was enough to end that moment quickly.  Now he were are 2 months until the big day when I become his wife.

I cannot wait for the next few months to get here.  But I do not want to miss out on any of our time right now.  I have been keeping all of the little knick-knacks during our engagement in hopes of creating a journal.

Cheers!