The beginning

In any operation step one is always to plan. Start a business you make a business plan. Buying a home, and you make a plan for that. The problem with plans is that most of the time it is the most boring and drawn out process. However, it is also the most important.

The Dave Ramsey Plan obviously starts out with a plan, a budget. Doing the budget actually turned out to be a fun process. Take the use of the word fun lightly because I am not saying I wouldn't rather be at the beach, but it was refreshing to really sit down and see where we are at and where we can be.

One part of Dave's budget is the debt snowball. We fill out a chart showing exactly what we have for debt. This part was the most difficult to see because I think its hard to realize exactly how much debt you really do have.

We have two types of debt, the first is our personal family debt, which is our first target. The second is, is debt from a past business. The debt from the past business is not going to be included in the first portion of the Dave Ramsey plan as this portion is solely about our personal debt and getting out of it.

Here is our initial list of debts...

Debt - Amount - Detail
Kyle Credit Card - $376.28 - I started this to build credit as I was told I should
Care Credit - $1,079.98 - Broke a tooth, this is the result
Gardner White - $3,023.31 - We got the awesome no interest deal
Chase - $5973.53 - This got built up partially with business debt and extra spending when things got tight.
Chrysler Financial - $25,225.66 - Vehicle

So the grand total - $35,678.76

The first two debts are small and I think we can easily knock those out in 1-2 months which will clear out a small portion of the list. The remaining debts are going to take some time but I definitely think we can do it. The largest portion is the vehicle debt which we are well upside down on thanks mainly to the several thousand in rollover from my truck lease. The strategy on this debt is going to depend on our income.

Because we have a variable income if were doing well it may make sense to just pay it completely off and keep the vehicle because it is a very nice vehicle with a lifetime powertrain warranty that paid off for us once already. However, if things aren't progressing as quickly as we want, if we can pay about 1/2 of it off then we would most likely sell the vehicle.

Overall I am hoping that we can have all of this paid off within 18 months at the longest.