Truly a 4 letter word that I can no longer wait to never use again. As I blogged about a few weeks ago, you can ready about it here, my wife and I started using the Dave Ramsey budgeting tool and honestly, I took a stab in the dark on a few things, i.e. Gas and Food, but I have to stay for our 1st month, I was able to notice a few trends:

1) I wasn’t that far off with my guess for Gas. I budgeted $400 and we spent $425.
2) I budgeted $500 for groceries and we spent $550.

Not bad, right? I had over budgeted on a few things, i.e. I built in $100 for Doctor visits, but we didn’t use that, so we were still within budget. But what really came from this budget, was a sense of responsibility and more importantly, encouragement, because not only did we stay within our budget, 3 other things came from our 1st month of budgeting:

1) We gave more in January than we did last year to charity.
2) We did not eat out as much, because we did over spend in our grocery spend, we were able to cook more and take more for our lunches, which also reduced our eating out and saved us $25 from what I had budgeted.
3) We paid an additional $250 last month towards paying off our debt.

DEBT is a really bad word and one that I would encourage everyone to focus on getting out of and never using the word again. I’ve had numerous conversations with a close friend that is in the Financial industry regarding the Dave Ramsey plan at the end of the day, I asked him one question and it was one that he couldn’t answer and here it is: “If I am able to get out of debt in 2 years, does it matter if I follow the principles of Dave Ramsey or someone else?” And he simply smiled and said no. My point is, I like Dave Ramsey’s plan, it makes sense to me and is giving me and my family a path to follow to get out of debt. We didn’t get in debt overnight and we had a lot of fun getting in debt, but it is going to take sacrifices to change those habits and get out of debt.

My wife and I have had a lot of conversations lately around debt, but more importantly our future and out future looks a lot more clearer and brighter knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.