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How to Build your Emergency Fund

Family Balance Sheet

This post was first published in 2016. Life suddenly changed for most of us in March 2020 and this past year of the pandemic has reinforced how important an emergency fund is. If you’re able, maybe use some of your stimulous money to put towards building an emergency fund. What is an Emergency Fund?

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Create your debt freedom plan

Family Balance Sheet

Many years ago, my husband and I faced what we thought was an insurmountable hurdle– six figures of non-mortgage debts. Prior to FPU, we thought we were doing well financially and never considered that we had too much debt. But Dave Ramsey’s view of debt is very different. Debt is Dumb and Cash is King.”. “…and

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How our Debt Freedom Plan Prepared Us for the Pandemic

Family Balance Sheet

How Our Debt Freedom Plan Prepared Us for the Pandemic. Our emergency fund. I am totally paraphrasing the year, but had it not been for the money in our emergency savings, we would most likely have used credit cards to survive. This new business debt weighed on me. Our first storm: 2007. Storm #2: 2013.

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2019 Debt Freedom Plan Update

Family Balance Sheet

Our Debt Freedom Plan has been a long winding road. The journey started in 2012 when we bought an office building for our business and then found ourselves with a lot of debt and not enough cash flow. To ease my anxiety about our new loans, we took the Financial Peace University home course and it changed how we thought about debt.

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How We Paid off Six Figures of Debt

Family Balance Sheet

It was so big that I cried for two days straight– we paid off six figures in non-mortgage debts. How we got to six figures of non-mortgage debt: In the summer of 2012, we found an opportunity to purchase an office building for our small business. After the first year, the new business debt weighed on me.

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Our 2017 Debt Freedom Plan Update

Family Balance Sheet

As I reflect back to January 2016, I started that year pretty determined to pay off the balance of our non-mortgage debts. And we were on a roll in January 2016. Unfortunately, we did not hit that goal and in part, have made some major changes to our Debt Freedom Plan. I even created a hashtag, #crushingdebt2016.

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Our Big Financial Goal for 2016

Family Balance Sheet

2016 will be THE year. As God is my witness, it WILL be the year that we pay off the last of our non-mortgage debt. That was the month I didn’t know if we had enough funds to cover our expenses. At the time, we had 4 business loans and 1 student loan that were weighing on us, so we created our Debt Freedom Plan.