One of my friends even has a signature gift wrap. She uses brown kraft paper and pink raffia. Her presents looks so pretty and have become part of her “trademark” — no one in our town would dare wrap their presents the same way and we are jealous that she thought of it first. She always keeps those supplies in her home and she’s always ready when it’s time to show up with a gift!

Consider giving it some thought and coming up with your own special signature gift! You won’t kill your budget and you’ll always be ready!

It was a start.

About six months down the road, my eyeglasses broke. “Great!” I said, “We have money in our emergency fund!” My husband was completely against using that money and said we would have to put the expense on a credit card. (This was an emergency because I’m legally required to wear glasses when driving.)

We had a huge argument that showed we both had fundamental differences and beliefs about money and how it should be handled.

But then we got inspired! What if we made a loan to ourselves from our emergency fund? We agreed to set our own terms, put them in writing and pay back our fund over and above our regular savings amount! This made us both happy!

We took the amount we borrowed and divided it by 10. We gave ourselves the option of skipping one month (we are benevolent bankers) and we charged ourselves 10% interest (simple) interest.

No credit card was touched, the emergency fund continued to blossom and marital bliss resumed!

After seeing Drive Free Cars on Dave Ramsey’s site (yeah we could all poke a few holes in this but still the basic concept is sound,) I became more determined than ever to drive my (paid off) car until the wheels fall off!

I am fanatic about changing the oil but had problems remembering to rotate the tires. I thought about starting a spreadsheet but I knew I forget about it before the time came.

If you need your oil changed every 5,000 miles you’re set. Just rotate the tires at the same time and be done with it!

A guest poster suggested one should pay down their mortgage early. Actually (at least for our situation,) I disagree. Consider hearing me out…

We have been following Dave Ramsey’s plan as outlined in his book “Total Money Make-over.” We attended Financial Peace University and have made more progress in the last two years than in the previous twenty years of marriage. Thanks to Dave, we are debt-free except for the mortgage and I wrote CheckMATE so that I could manage our spending as he teaches. I owe Dave a tremendous “thank you” and recommend him to anyone who asks about money.

Dave takes you through seven baby steps and we are getting close to baby step 6 where we should pay off our house. Thankfully Dave also encourages people to think for themselves so we’ve been doing some analysis on our own.

We both work for the same company and our jobs are tied to the housing market. Thankfully business is okay right now - down but okay. Our jobs seem secure. We are also a little older and are starting to get more conservative with money. Keeping that in mind, consider these three outcomes and see if any apply to you.

1. Let’s say we have six months worth of expenses saved in case we lose our jobs. Then we start paying down our mortgage. We owe approximately $100,000 and we throw everything we can at our mortgage. Let’s say some time goes by and we get the balance of our mortgage down to $50,000. Then, the worst happens and we lose our jobs. We don’t find other jobs and six months later, our savings are exhausted. Three months later, the bank forecloses and we lose our home. We are back at square one but hopefully still debt-free.
2. Now let’s say we saved a year’s worth of living expenses before we lost our jobs (instead of paying extra on our mortgages.) Now we have a full year to try to find a new job. But let’s say we don’t and 15 months later, the bank forecloses. We are back at square one, hopefully debt-free and we didn’t have as much money tied up in our home.
3. Finally, let’s say we keep throwing money at our savings and in the meantime, the economy comes back. We don’t pay down our mortgage but we do keep throwing everything we can at our savings. Our savings keeps going up and our mortgage keeps coming down. At some point, we are going to have more in savings than we owe on our mortgage. We keep saving a bit more (because we do want that emergency fund) and then we pay off our house all at once.

I think these are tough times and that every family should think their decisions through. Think about your own unique circumstances and your own tolerance for risk. In the end, you’ll make a better decision that will serve you well!

I spent a quiet evening on some financial message board forums and people are facing tough times. One woman is trying to figure out how to keep paying her daughter’s college tuition and she put this last semester’s tuition on a credit card. The debts keep mounting and their budget will soon go under. Some of the community members wondered why the daughter wasn’t trying to help pay her tuition. It got me thinking about some of our own experiences and a visual we used with our own kids.

When we faced a tough time in our financial lives, we took enough Monopoly money to represent our salaries and gathered the kids around the kitchen table. They asked us what was up (the kids were in elementary school at the time) and we told them we wanted them to see how much money we made! Then we told them we wanted them to help us figure out how to spend it!

Their eyes got wide and they enthusiastically agreed to help!

First, we asked if we should continue tithing our money to the Lord. Kids in elementary school are pretty sweet and they felt that yes, we should definitely do that. We showed them how to calculate ten percent and moved that much to the side.

They were ready to spend! But unfortunately there was this little matter of taxes. They were shocked and horrified! Even at their tender ages, they knew Ronald Reagan was the president and they knew that paying that much in taxes was just wrong! But whoosh! Off to the side, it went.

By then, they were catching on. The oldest figured out there was rent to pay (my husband had just graduated from college and there was no house at that time.) We pointed out that “rent” also includes pesky things like lights, water, cable and phone. Whoosh!

Our lovely pile of money was getting very small! After we deducted car insurance, gasoline and food, they started volunteering to mow lawns and sell lemonade!

We encouraged them that their Daddy had a job with a great future and that things would soon improve (and thankfully we were right.) But they did grasp what our salaries represented and they have grown to become decent money managers.

I took his advice to heart (the biggest thing I learned was to sound like a broken record when buying life insurance as we repeat the words: renewable, convertible, term life insurance.)  I had completed the first two years of my engineering degree and loved the engineering economy class (which I ace’d thank you!)  I started making spreadsheets and trying to budget.

The spreadsheets didn’t help - everything I set up was historical and only told me what I did.

I wanted to manage our money and needed a tool to tell me what I could spend.

Soon afterwards, we moved to Dalton, GA where my husband began his career as a chemical engineer with a major carpet company.  We have a marvelous radio station that is part of Moody Bible Institute and I started listening to (the late) Larry Burkette.  I learned to use the envelope system and he had forms in one of the books he sold that tracked what you could spend.  It was manual and tedious.

By now I was studying software engineering as a computer science major at Southern Polytechnic.  I worked as a computer programmer and had the skills to write software to manage our checkbook as a virtual envelope system.

That software, written in a DOS program called Foxpro, was the daddy to CheckMate!  It served our family well for many years.  When the kids wanted to order pizza, the answer was always the same - “Go ask the computer!”  That was the standard answer for every spending question we had and it was great to let the computer be the heavy.