The king and I have taken/taught the dave ramsey fincancial peace class and followed the principals in it. We really like the philosopies presented in it. We followed those rules for several years. We are presenting them to our children as a good financial plan....because it IS!
But then there is life. 2 summers ago, we had a well stocked emergency fund. We had no debt outside our mortgage and we were moving forward to really get things settled and start really chunking money into a retirement fund. Then a deer totaled my van. We had to chose between a car loan and completely depleting our emergency fund and paying cash. We chose to pay cash for the van. And it feels like we've never recovered from that. We've cash flowed everything. But we can't seem to get caught back up.
We live in the country and had a HORRIBLE well. All of us could not shower daily and I had to ration laundry. We have 4 children. One of them a teenage boy and another a soon to be teenage boy. This was causing incredible problems in our house. We started planning to pay to have "city water" brought to our house. We applied and signed contracts. We saved. We almost cash flowed the whole thing. But not quite
M and I had an opportunity to go to Australia. We cash flowed that trip. Maybe we should have put that money in the emergency fund. But it was an opportunity that may never present itself again. And certainly not while he is old enough to take that flight but young enough to not have too many obligations.
One of the "deals" with my Australia adventure was that the King wanted he and I to go on a little getaway this winter for the 2 of us. I thought we'd have a weekend in Nashville, or New Orleans. He picked an all inclusive resort in Jamaica (I'm not complaining). We cash flowed the trip.
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We've been having trouble with the bedroom layout in our house (one extra little bedcave room shared a wall with the master bedroom -and the child who slept in it stayed up to eavesrop and comment about what she heard-ahem!- and was not big enough to even really qualify as a bedroom). We decided this fall to do the work required to make a big bedroom for 2 kids and tear out the "cave room" We were going to cash flow this project. Not too difficult.
Then I needed a medical procedure. Insurance raised our deductible 2 days before my surgery without good communication and surprised us. Fine. We'll get it paid for. The procedure has a 90% success rate and we wanted to get it done so we could switch to a medical share option for insurance-that we think will work better for us....but needed to do it first because of timing and pre-existing and insurance mumbo jumbo before switching over) Then I discovered I'm in the 10% and the procedure failed and I have to have surgery (and pay the deductible all over again because since the procedure didn't work the new med share timing is even longer than it was before). I am so thankful it is not life-threatening....but it is life altering. We can not pay cash for this.
The remodel job is half done. We have no choice but to move forward on it....which meant buying/charging building supplies. But 2 of the children can't just sleep in the living room till they are grown.
My van started acting really funny. I felt like I could lose control on the interstate. I figured new shocks were in the cards. Nope FOUR new tires! Yeah. More bills.
We've never gotten to the stage in his plan to put money in retirement. We are further from that stage right now than we were 2 years ago. And yet we are getting older. Forget that. Money goes in retirement starting now. Thankfully, we contributed to retirement faithfully before "financial peace". We aren't getting younger and if we want any part of our retirement dreams to become retirement reality we can't keep waiting to save for it.
Technically, we could cancel our trip. Get most of our money back to use for the surgery deductible(s). I could cancel the kids art classes and music lessons....to put toward tires. I do have a job now. We could cancel all our extras. We could go back to a phone in the wall. We could never eat out. But at what point do you say....we are trying our hardest and we are saving and making well thought out decisions. And things are working against us (hello multiple surguries/deductibles and being in an income bracket where we get zero assistance). But although we want to plan for the future, we are only promised RIGHT NOW and there are opportunites to not pass up for later. Later may never come. And we only get one chance to raise our children. A will be grown and theoretically out on his own in 4 years. The others aren't far behind. We don't get a redo on their childhoods.
So I guess we failed at Dave Ramsey....we failed at financial peace. And yet....making the decisions we've made in the last year or so has led to far more peace than being doggedly tied to the DR philosophy. I would still recommend the class. Our church is actually offering it in 2 different time/location options starting tonight (if you are interested contact me). But for us we are much happier with a milder, more balanced lifestyle.
Edited to add: I am very grateful for the principals that we learned and where we have been so that this isn't more of a setback. It is sucky enough as it is. WE only have the bills associated with all the sucker punches of the last few months to contend with....we weren't already in debt. So at least there is that.
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