Last fall, my husband and I attended Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University Class at our church.  Prior to this, I had been following Dave for quite some time.  I loved the way he taught and yet, something held me back in following all of his steps.

I blamed it on my husband, that he didn’t have the same frame of mind that I had and I felt like I was fighting him along with the stress of getting our debt in order.   So I never did anything about it.

I finally convinced my husband that he needed to attend this class with me and when our church offered the class, he agreed. Dave’s teaching changed they way my husband thought about money and I finally had some peace that we were on the same page of how we want to deal with our finances.

However, 6 months later… we still haven’t gotten into practicing all of his steps. One of the reasons being the Frugal Fraud I’d been living, but in any case, there is no one to blame now, except ourselves and our laziness. We know we need to make changes but yet we failed to do so.  It made me think about how we’ve been dieting.  How losing weight requires us to eat right and exercise. The more weight we lose the more excited we got.  That’s exactly what we’ve got to do with our finances.

So starting May 1st we’re getting into gear of “dieting and exercising” our finances.

We don’t have much debt, outside of our mortgage.  We have some lingering credit card debt and a student loan.  But if you add them all together let’s just say people pay more for a car than what we owe.  I’d share with you the exact amount, but my husband wasn’t comfortable with me doing that, so we compromised that going forward, I could share with you how much we’ve paid toward our debt. So be sure to take a look at the right. I’ve created a column to show how much money we’ve paid toward our debt beginning May 1st, 2012.

If you’re familiar with Dave, you’ll know his motto is that you’ve got to live like no one else so you can live like no one else and that’s what we plan to do!

We’ll be concentration on 3 of his 7 steps.  This first 3 steps are:

Step 1:  Save $1,000 (This is your short term emergency fund, anything emergency related will be used from this and not your credit card.. vacation and hot sales do not count.  It’s for car repairs, broken appliances etc…)

Step 2:  The Debt Snowball (Paying off your debt, lowest to highest first. Lowest first, just to keep your motivation up.. dieting and losing weight aren’t fun if you don’t see any success)

Step 3:  Finish the Emergency Fund – Saving 3-6 months of living expenses.

Right now, we are on Step 2, The Debt Snowball.  In upcoming posts, I’ll be sharing with you how we’re moving along and who knows, I may even get my husband to write a few posts to share his point of view.  It’s not going to be easy, no diet ever is. But I’m really excited because my husband is on board and he’s kicking us into gear.

Do you need to put your finances on a diet?  Feel free to join me on these steps, so we can live like no one else!!