Debt to Dreams

My wife and I have been tracking our expenses diligently since January 2006. The process of actually sitting down and developing a system for keeping track of where our money is going has been enlightening and the most useful step towards financial independence for our young family.
In 2007 we were able to […]

Although I have been blogging about my finances for a relatively short period of time I have been following my credit card debt since July of 2005.
I have found that an often overlooked key to success is the development of a system that works for you.
How do you keep your money in […]

I took a portion of my time off during the holidays to update my accounts in Quicken and analyze where we ended up spending our money over the past 12 months.
I was quite disappointed to find that we were $20,000 over what I had guessed our yearly expenses would be in 2007. […]

I had a reminder last month of how thankful I am that I finally managed to get my financial house in order(as much as you can with a ton of educational debt)
As I have progressed in my education, each step has required a progressively more expensive examination to reach the next level. […]

Since we have passed the 6 month mark I thought it would be appropriate to revisit our Financial Plan for 2007. When we made this plan back in January, I was not quite sure what to think. We were recently married and still in the process of combining our lifestyles and finances. […]

When I stop and think about it, managing our finances shouldn’t be that hard. If you get down to the basics you just need more money coming in than you have money going out. Very original thoughts, I know. When I realized that I was in over my head in late […]

In the spirit of Tax season I was thinking about all the various taxes we pay and was kind of wondering if there was any way for me to avoid some of these taxes without having to worry about some governmental agency showing up at my door one day.
The only taxes that I feel I […]

In the wake of a great March I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think have been good financial decisions for us this year. To paint a picture of where we are now, I want to show where we started. This has proved difficult since I only have last year’s […]

So far, so good.
We didn’t make whole lot of New Years resolutions but the one that I felt was most important to our financial health for 2007 was having a budget and knowing where we were spending our money.
I mentioned earlier that I have used Quicken for the past year but did not find it […]

At this point in my life I can easily believe the stories of Residents/Interns in years past having their power/water or telephone cut off because they spent so much time at the hospital that they didn’t have time to pay their bills.
Last week was one of those weeks that I thank those who came before […]

How many days can you go without spending a dime? Apparently for us, not very many.
My wife and I have decided to make an effort to control our spending this year by writing down all of our expenses for the week on a 3X5 index card. It sounds pretty simple and I can see […]

I am thinking of changing the name of this blog to Musings of a Married Man because most of my posts this month have been related to married life.
Here is another post to add to that list.
I have spent the past month getting rid of many of the items I have accumulated over my short […]

Don’t worry my wife and I are fine. My microwave however got the boot when the Mrs moved in and honestly I haven’t really missed it…..yet.  I know that it is really strange to live without a microwave nowdays but the decision pretty much boiled down to counter space and the microwave had to go.
Now this […]

They need to pay the bills somehow.
I had been planning on getting out of my current cell phone contract for the past six months in anticipation of reaping some cost savings with a family plan once I was married. Cell phone companies do their best to keep us from switching with large early cancellation […]

I have finally managed to resolve all three of the major personal finance mistakes I made shortly after school! Correcting these mistakes has definitely been critical in turning around my financial situation.
The biggest mistake took the longest to resolve but that is to be expected. Over the course of 2006 I had already […]