Financial lessons...

Debt Hater has a post up of the Top 10 Financial Lessons she's learned this year (although she only has 5-10 so far) and a few resonated with me.

9. You MUST have a plan to get out of debt.

This is SO true. You can pay pay pay money to the credit mofos all you want, but if you don't know how you are going to get OUT of debt, then you're just wasting money. I don't know the exact numbers, but if you just pay the minimums on your balance, it takes something like 20 years to pay your balance completely off. That's crazy!

I have a plan to get out of my debt and while it's not 100%, it's a start. What about you?

8. Budgeting is not an option.

It's funny (in an oh so tragic way), I used to be incredibly ANAL about budgeting - I mean, down to the penny. I actually liked balancing my checkbook and receiving bills. I called it playing with money. I was so on track for fabulous financial freedom... And then, I got into a relationship. The relationship wasn't necessarily the problem, it was budgeting for two people with very different financial habits that was. I am a saver, she is a spender and that caused problems. Surprisingly, we didn't fight about money. But the problem was that I didn't know where every penny went, like before. My budget was too inflexible to handle two spenders. Unfortunately, I was never able to make a budget work.

I have had some personal issues with my relationship, which we are coming out of now. Throughout this, we separated all of our finances. I am sure that this will impact our future finances.

6. Financial jargon isn't scary.

I am still working on this. I shy away from learning about things like 401k and IRAs and such, because I don't know about them.

Thanks DH for the inspiration!

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