Money & Evil

The thought yesterday in the book was:

The Love of Money is the Root of All Evil

Well, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the root of ALL evil, but I get the point. Money is reportedly the #1 cause for divorce. It has also brought a lot of sorrow and regret to many lottery winners. It's astounding to see all that's befallen those newly minted millionaires. Just google "curse of the lottery" and see what I mean.

Money isn't a daily topic in our house, but we do have a budget spreadsheet that I update regularly. We also have credit card debt and right now our focus is to eliminate that permanently. We bought the Dave Ramsey system. Used our cash envelopes for about 6 months and we did make some headway. But the system overwhelmed me. The workbooks, the dvds, the cds, the electronic spreadsheets. So I started my own spreadsheet with pencil & paper, been doing that for about a year. Again, made a little headway, but still not where I feel we need to be.

So, I started looking into other ways to tackle this debt. There was an article about debt management apps in All You Magazine. I looked at each of the ones they reviewed and decided to give Ready for Zero a try. The website is easy to navigate and the program is really simple. The basic version is free and really it's all we need. No request to enter any form of payment, it's not a free trial, it's just a free program. They claim it only takes minutes to set up the account and enter your info, but for me it was more like 1 hour. Probably because you have to set up an online username/password for each of your credit cards with the CC company first. Then you link them to your Ready for Zero account.
It was worth every minute spent doing it in my opinion though.

After set up, you have ALL your debt in one place. At a glance you can see every payment due, interest rates, it even calculates the month/year of payoff for each debt. You can adjust a little sliding scale to show if you pay an extra X number of dollars per month toward your debt how it will effect your payoff date and the interest you will save.

This program isn't for people who are struggling to make monthly payments, it is not a debt consolidation program. It's truly a debt management tool and sort of along the lines of an adult sticker chart.  If you don't like sticker charts, you're probably a stodgy, old, responsible person who has no debt anyway!

We've been using the program now for about a month and so far I love it. I can really see the debt decreasing.  The app is great too, it's like a pocket version of the website. There are progress charts and little text alerts (if you have them on) to remind you of a payment due or even a tip to let you know if you make an extra payment this month, on a specific card, how much it will save you overall.

These are just my thoughts on the program. I did not get paid to review it, not even sure how I would if I wanted to! The thought in Thoughts for a Good Life triggered my brain to write about my experience with this program.

So my final thoughts on money...I don't believe it's the root of ALL evil, but it is the root of a lot of extra work and some extra stress in my house until we are debt free...which according to Ready for Zero will be June 2017!