I’ve Got Gazelle Intensity

I’m fired up! Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University gets better and better each week. My husband and I have a working budget. It covers all the bases, keeps our spending in check, and will eventually allow us to live the way that we want to live without being slave to our debts.

Tonight we covered lesson 4, Dumping Debt. I think I’ve cried a bit before about how the credit card companies and the loan companies and the banks seem like they control our lives. But, like Dave says, it doesn’t have to be that way. Dayman and I are in the process of Baby Step 2 in the program. We’re on our way to becoming debt free. Using Dave’s Debt Snowball program, we pay off the smallest debt first, regardless of interest rates. Once that debt is paid off, the amount you would have spent monthly on that first debt is applied to the next debt. And so on.

We have stopped borrowing. As of two minutes ago, we’ve cut up EVERY SINGLE CREDIT CARD! We’re running from the cheetah, and we’re going to get away!!!!! I think I will probably talk more about the Dave Ramsey course in the future. I really believe that the principles set forth in this financial plan will completely change our lives. For the first time, we will control our money instead of letting it control us.

If you feel like you are drowning, and there is no hope, take comfort from Proverbs 6:1-5 (TNIV):

My son, if you have put up security for your neighbor, if you have shaken hands in pledge for a stranger, you have been trapped by what you said, ensnared by the words of your mouth.

So do this, my son, to free yourself, since you have fallen into your neighbors’ hands: Go — to the point of exhaustion — and give your neighbor no rest! Allow no sleep to your eyes, no slumber to your eyelids.

Free yourself, like a gazelle from the hand of the hunter, like a bird from the snare of the fowler.

Amen.

Peace, linden.