Almost daily, I go to Dave Ramsey's facebook page, click on "everyone" or "all" (so that I see everyone's comments and not just those working for Dave), and read the comments left by people. It keeps me motivated. Reading about what a difference FPU has made in the lives of strangers boosts my confidence in the program. I haven't yet listened to the radio show and probably won't until we have watched all of the lessons on DVD.
In an effort to being more organized relative to money and bills, I have been trying to check our bank accounts online and balance the checkbook daily. It only takes about 5 minutes and will save me time in the long run. The kids and I worked on cleaning out the office and I focused on organizing the desk. All incoming bills now have a little bin rather than just being tossed on the desk.
We're still trying to sell different things that we don't really need. An extra patio set, a canoe, an air hockey table, etc. There are a few things that we can't decide if we should try to sell or not.
Last night, JD and I watched the 5th FPU lesson, Credit Sharks in Suits. It was very timely as I received an email from Bank of America with my newest statement as soon as we finished watching the lesson. I was excited to look and see a balance due of $0.00. We hadn't used it in about 6 weeks and had paid the balance in full earlier this month. I was confused when I saw a balance of $15.90. There weren't any new purchases, and we realize it was categorized as an interest charge. We had paid the balance due in full, so we weren't sure why there would be an interest charge. We called Bank of America and were surprised to get a real live person at about 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. When I asked about the charge, the gal was extremely pleasant and immediately said she'd reverse the charge due to there being no new purchases, and she then went on to explain why the charge was there. Since some of the previous month's charges were from a prior month, interest was still being added daily until payment was received. I'm still a little confused as to how you can pay a balance off in full and still get charged, but I didn't question it since she did reverse it. At the same time, we asked her to cancel the card. Yay!
Next, we printed out free credit reports from www.annualcreditreport.com. Federal law requires the three main credit reporting companies to provide a free credit report each year. We each printed one out (you can get one every 4 months by choosing a different company each time) and looked through them. We marked off all the things we needed to cancel, mostly store credit cards like Sears, Kohls, etc. We are going to keep one credit card for now, but we have no plans to use it.
I will be calling to cancel all of the other cards this week; some are accounts with stores that I don't even shop at and have no idea what happened to the card (Pacific Sunwear?). We'll also be looking at our budget plan for April and figuring out how to do the whole envelope system thing. JD and I were talking to friends about FPU and I like how he described it to them as a challenge, something we're out to prove we can do. Stay tuned.
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