Good evening everyone who happens to come across this blog. I hope you enjoy yourself as I drag you along on my blogging adventure. I've never written a blog before, but I figure I've got plenty of opinion to go around and even some research and fact to back it up.
One of my passions in life (and what I know God put me on this planet to do) is helping people learn. I know that I've been given the gift of teaching, and using it to help those around me is the most rewarding thing I do. I try my best to have the heart of teacher in all things, and though sometimes I may fail I will press on and continue doing my best to help.
The last two years of my life have been, without a doubt, two of the most amazing years of my life. But they have also been hard. Let me give you a little background on me.
I was raised in Gloucester county, just north of Newport News. At the age of 16 I became a Christian. That changed my life, for sure, but that's just the beginning of my story. I attended college and began studying the art of public speaking. College was fun, and I successfully managed to squeeze 4 years into 7. Before I graduated with my degree in Speech Communications, I met and married my wonderful wife, Jennifer. Now the story starts getting good.
After a year of wonderful marriage, my wife became pregnant. It was at this point in time that we realized that we had a problem. Our spending was out of control. I blame mostly myself. Having never really learned much about money, I went on spending sprees just because I wanted to and I "deserved it" for working hard. I treated our bank account like my personal piggy bank and ATM'd us to death.
My wife wasn't perfect, either, but at least she had a good head on her shoulders and forced us to save a little money here and there. But neither of us truly knew what it meant to have discipline in our finances.
That all changed when our church put on a finance class by Dave Ramsey. Now, if you haven't heard of Dave Ramsey, you really need to look the man up sometime. He's got some great books and a really good finance program. But this blog isn't about Dave Ramsey. It's about how my wife and I took control of our money and changed our life together.
And change we did. The biggest thing Mr. Ramsey's class did for me personally was give me a wake up call. The message my wife had been trying to get through my thick skull finally started to sink in, and I immediately owned up to my immaturity. Remember, at the time my wife was pregnant. We had a car payment, a computer payment, a mortgage, and some pretty hefty baby bills to pay. Our insurance wasn't horrible but it wasn't the best either, and since our daughter was conceived in one year and born in the next we had to pay our deductible and out of pocket max twice. Yeah...that sucked.
And I was ATMing us to death with my spending sprees. We had no plan, no drive, and no real knowledge of what it took to fix our mess. So we took the advice given to us and sat down and did something that makes the average American shudder: we made ourselves a b u d g e t.
Budget...the word doesn't come out of your mouth easily. It hangs on your tongue and tries to go back down your throat. But despite the negative attitude most people have towards budgeting, Jen and I found that having a plan for your money is actually the most freeing feeling you can get when it comes to money.
Over the next two years, my wife and I put our noses to the grind stone and dramatically changed the way we handle money. Our change in discipline allowed us to pay the baby bills in cash. Remember when I said we paid our deductible and out of pocket twice? It came up to just shy of $9,000!!! We owed about $7500 on the car, and paid it off about six months later. We sold stuff, worked overtime, worked extra days/jobs, and busted our tails in order to pay it all off. I worked so hard that my manager took notice and actually promoted me to a permanent position, meaning I got all my company's benefits (including health insurance and a matching 401k). But we weren't done yet.
Over the next year we learned TONS of information on saving money, cutting costs, proper budgeting, and even investing. What started as just a spark from the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace class because a hobby and ultimately a passion. My wife and I now strive to help as many as we can learn how to control their money.
This led me full circle back to my passion of teaching. I just got approved to teach a class through the Newport News Parks and Rec department on personal finance. When asked what we wanted to teach on, we said we want to teach the stuff that your grandmother tried to teach you, money handling rules and techniques that have been taught for hundreds (and some even thousands) of years. This stuff is supposed to be common knowledge, but in our current culture it this information has become scarce.
Therefore I submit to you the topic of my blog and the name of our class: Common Cents. (See what I did there?)
I hope you choose to join me on my journey. I'm going to be talking a LOT about budgeting, saving money, working together as a family, cutting costs, and getting debt out of your life completely. Expect a lot of fact and research to back up my opinion. I'm not the first person to teach this, and hopefully won't be the last. But I know that so many people need this information, even if they don't know it yet.
So many people are wandering around without a plan and it shows in our society when the average American household is $15k in credit card debt according to the Federal Reserve. A lot of people want to pound on the government about how much their spending is out of control. And it's true, our government is now approaching $17 TRILLION. But did you know that American consumer debt is over $11 TRILLION? Seriously, Google it.
This is the kinda info that needs to be taught, and I'm going to be joining several others on the path to teaching our communities that info. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I will.
TL;DR: My name is Heath and I want to teach people how to not be poor. Read up for lots of info and tips.
-Heath
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