Tonight we attended FPU (Financial Peace University) for our fourth session. I attended FPU during my senior year at IWU for Personal and Family Finance with Prof Jerry Showalter (affectionately referred to as "Showtime"). The founder and leader of FPU is Dave Ramsey, a Christian radio-show host, best selling author, and financial guru.
Though I have attended FPU before, Amy and I decided that we wanted to attend the classes together and especially learn about investing and financial planning for retirement. However, I've been learning about more than just financial planning for the future. One particular discipline that I have been tweaking since attending the classes has been budgeting. I know, the dreadful word and discipline of budgeting. No one likes doing it, but, when done correctly and with motivation and consistency, it can be one of the best tools for financial peace.
Currently, we budget every month and have a balance at the end of the month that we want to hit in our checking account, which gives us a big cushion. I like this for the sake of having big payments that are coming out of our general checking account at various times of the month (i.e. mortgage, nursing school payments, etc.). However, this makes it difficult for us to truly have a zero-based budget. So, here are some of our goals that we hope to accomplish by the end of FPU:
- Have Amy's Grad School paid for. She will still have about a year and a half to go, but we plan to have enough saved up to pay the remaining balance by the end of November.
- Fine tune and become consistent in budgeting every month. Sometimes we go in spurts - budgeting for a few months, and then off for a few, so we have a goal of being consistent, monthly budgeters.
- Refinance Our House. This goal is contingent on what we find out in research for refinancing - if we'll need 20%, how much closing cost fees will be, etc... Nonetheless, we have a strong desire to refinance for a better interest rate and to move to a 15 year mortgage.
Those are just a few of our goals. We look forward to the rest of FPU and allowing God to use this in our lives to move us towards financial peace so that we can spend, save, and give like never before!
