I wouldn’t normally even blog about this topic. I think its a very personal one for me… But, over the past year and a half, we have made numerous changes to how we handle our money. Almost two years ago, my close friend Kevin gave me a series of CD’s from a guy named Dave Ramsey. I have to admit, those collected dust in my house for almost a year. But, I did finally listened to a couple of them. As I had started them, one of my co-workers and friends (my next-cube neighbor at work) began taking the entire Financial Peace University series with others of my friends through their church. Frankly, I liked what I was hearing from them when they were talking about it at work, so it peaked my interest. So, I worked my way through the series with Jen. And it has made a huge impact in our personal finances.
The first thing that Dave advocates is getting rid of your debt. I’m glad to say, we’re very close to our goal of having only two debt payments per month - our mortgage and my student loan payment. By next May, our car will be paid in full and we’ll have met our goal. That’s a huge personal accomplishment for us!
The second is one we are tackling tonight… Getting rid of credit cards. Tonight I had a monumental realization. We HAVE over $50,000 in available debt credit on 6 credit cards! $50,000 dollars… It blows me away. So, we’re canceling those — tonight! After tonight, we’ll have only one major credit card, and a Victoria’s Secret card my wife won’t part with… because of the “free panties” - so we’re keeping that one. We also have a couple no-interest accounts that aren’t paid up yet, but those will be closed in just a couple months, once they are paid in full. Once those are paid, I’ll finally OWN this desk I’m using to write this post… Anyways, I digress.
I may not ever post about this again, but finding out how much available credit we had just sitting around unused was a big impact to me - and that juxtaposed against our accomplishments over the past year was something to mention. I may post more later, or maybe not… It is a rather personal topic for me…
Well, Jen and I just returned from Las Vegas. We had a week long trip for me to attend the VMworld conference and for Jen to have a little vacation. Jen was able to join some of the other wives and do things around town while all of their husbands were busy with the conference. It worked out really well.
Jen and I were able to fit in a little time to relax at the pool on Monday and then we were able to see Blue Man Group at the Ventitian on Tuesday evening. Jen also got to tour the Hoover Dam and go out to see the Grand Canyon and lots of Vegas sites. Jen has started a gallery with photos online.
Peyton stayed with Papa and Gaga Sellers while we were in Las Vegas. She got a little sick during the week and ended up having to go to the ER in Cheraw. She had a spot of congestion on her lung and a really bad sore throat. Antibiotics prescribed cleared everything up. I’m taking her back to the doctor tomorrow morning just to make sure that everything looks good. She is acting like she feels much better than she was feeling middle of last week.
Peyton has begun potty training too. She recently moved into the 2 year old classroom at daycare and they’ve begun working with her to potty train. We’re trying to continue that at home. She has gone pee-pee in the potty a couple times now. So, our world is becoming pull ups and pee-pee for the next little while…
Work is going great for both me and Jen. Jen is settling back in after a week away. She missed her annual teacher’s dinner last Tuesday evening. Everything went well. I am trying to decompress and process everything I learned at the conference last week. There was so much, its hard to get everything together. I’ll be briefing my co-workers sometime this week about everything that I learned…
I also started a second blog - one where I can post about my job, technology, and things in that arena that interest me. I posted heavily about things from the conference and surprisingly, I’m seeing a lot of traffic to my blog because of that. When you Google some of the topics I blogged about, my site is showing surprisingly high in the searches. That translates to traffic and readers - which is very exciting for me. I didn’t expect that - this was just something I wanted to do for myself. You can check it out at http://tech.philipsellers.com, if you’re interested. Its still a work in progress, but I’m working on it as I have time. One of my post even got picked up by the vendor’s blog and they linked to my post - pretty cool in my eyes… It was a nice birthday present - oh yeah - I turned 28 on Saturday. My best birthday present so far was Peyton singing Happy Birthday for me…
Today we’re visiting Hard Rock Park again. Brett and Trina are going with us. It’ll be their first time in the park. Today is the last day of their extended hours and they’ll be shortening their weeks to 3 days and hours to 11am to 7pm after this weekend through end of the year. We’re excited to get to ride the coasters again and see the shows. Peyton really loves watching the people go by on the Eagles coaster. And she loves to people watch.
Update: We had a blast today. Unfortuantely, the Maximum RPM coaster was down again, along with the Slipper when Wet water-coaster. So, we still haven’t gotten to ride Slippery. But we did get to plan in the nerf ball place and Peyton really enjoyed that. We didn’t stay for fireworks, but we did see the last Ice Show of the season tonight… it was by far the best we’d seen, though still not my cup of tea…
For a long time now, we’ve been collecting 4×6 photos in a photo box around our house. Most everything since 2000 or 2001 has been digital, but every part of our life documented before that was on film. After a lot of wasted time on Google looking for a nice scanner that would automatically scan a stack of 4×6 photos, I’ve just bitten the bullet and I’m scanning photos for a time on my el cheapo Canon flatbed. One of my biggest fears is losing all of these memories to a fire or some other catastophe. One of my friends recently had her business office flooded. Long stroy short, she lost a lot. Its taken her several months to rebuild the suite and get back to a sort-of even keel. And after hearing about the ordeal, I’ve been concerned with things that are irreplaceable in my house. So, I’ve started digitizing as much as possible. I have a wonderful online backup service that I use so everything that I’ve digitized will be pushed up to an online backup service where I can get to it, come whatever may…
We had a wonderful Easter weekend. We stayed in town and Peyton got to wear her new Easter dress for church on Sunday morning. My dad has been in town helping me to remodel a bathroom, so on Saturday, he and Jen took Peyton out for a while to let her hunt eggs. She had a ball with it. I can’t say that she was really into finding the eggs, but she liked playing with them in and out of the basket. We have new photos posted on the .Mac gallery of everything. Enjoy!
Yep, you read that right. She’s saying “I love you” now. We have it on video (sorry for the quality - its on a camera phone). But yes, she’s saying it - or, close enough for us to think she is…
I guess its time to let the blog progress. For the most part, the blog has been about our pride and joy, Peyton. But that’s not all that the family is interested in. Both Jen and I have our interests and I think we’ll both share our perspectives over time on here as well. In the spirit of that, I’ve added a new section on the sidebar for “Cool Articles that I’ve found Online”. Its a feed from my Google Reader, where I get most of my news these days. Whenever I find something cool in my news feeds, I can share them all of you too. Most of the stuff I read is about Apple computers, technical stuff and news around Myrtle Beach. So, take a look at the articles I have on the right…
