Military Pay has been saved for now...
Hooray our pay on the 15 of April will not be changed! I am so glad our government was at least able to come to a temporary agreement and keep our military families out of a financial mess. The threat however still lingers as our country gets deeper into debt with no real fix for the budget in sight. Did the idea of not getting your full pay scare you? While we knew it posed no immediate danger for us it sure got us thinking. Brent and I took a look at our budget and our savings and decided it was time to double our emergency fund.
We already have about 6 months worth of expenses saved up and ready to use in case of an emergency. We started saving our emergency fund the minute we paid off our last debt other then the mortgage back in December 2009 and we have already had to dip into it once to replace our leaking and rotted out roof. For our family the magic number was $12,000 we knew that would cover our four walls for about 6 months easily. We were also sure it would cover any insurance deductibles should there be any accidents to our home or vehicles.
We have followed Dave Ramsey's baby steps for getting out of debt and building wealth to the letter
Step 1 save a baby emergency fund of $1000
Step 2 debt snowball pay off your debts smallest to largest as fast as you can!
Step 3 fully fund your emergency fund with at least 3 to 6 months worth of expenses
and we were transitioning nicely into Step 4 which is start investing 15% of your income into retirement.
However after considering the fact that our income really is no longer as guaranteed as we once thought we are putting a halt on baby step 4 for a few months and planning to save away another $10,000 as quick as we can. We are used to living on a tight budget but for the next 5 months it is going to get even tighter so that we can reach our new goal.
Our family is the most important thing in the world to us, we want to make sure that they will always be provided for no matter what. While we sat waiting with thousands of military members around the world to see just how this was going to play out it became very obvious that we are the ones ultimately responsible for taking care of our children not our government. Not only was a shut down going to mean living on half a paycheck it was also going to mean no death benefits if something happened to my husband. I would have had to wait until the government was back up and running to receive any of the benefits we are entitled to. That was a nerve racking thought!
So we learned a lesson actually we learned two lessons as we watched this weeks political mess unfold. Brent and I are so blessed to have what we do. We both knew that we could live on nothing for a couple of weeks if we needed to and we knew that there was money in the bank if we needed it. We have also learned that you can not put a price on our family's security. We need to take measures to ensure that we are never caught off guard by something like this again. Well, I am off to go squeeze a few pennies out of our food budget and find any other areas of the budget that can be trimmed, cut and rearranged.
We already have about 6 months worth of expenses saved up and ready to use in case of an emergency. We started saving our emergency fund the minute we paid off our last debt other then the mortgage back in December 2009 and we have already had to dip into it once to replace our leaking and rotted out roof. For our family the magic number was $12,000 we knew that would cover our four walls for about 6 months easily. We were also sure it would cover any insurance deductibles should there be any accidents to our home or vehicles.
We have followed Dave Ramsey's baby steps for getting out of debt and building wealth to the letter
Step 1 save a baby emergency fund of $1000
Step 2 debt snowball pay off your debts smallest to largest as fast as you can!
Step 3 fully fund your emergency fund with at least 3 to 6 months worth of expenses
and we were transitioning nicely into Step 4 which is start investing 15% of your income into retirement.
However after considering the fact that our income really is no longer as guaranteed as we once thought we are putting a halt on baby step 4 for a few months and planning to save away another $10,000 as quick as we can. We are used to living on a tight budget but for the next 5 months it is going to get even tighter so that we can reach our new goal.
Our family is the most important thing in the world to us, we want to make sure that they will always be provided for no matter what. While we sat waiting with thousands of military members around the world to see just how this was going to play out it became very obvious that we are the ones ultimately responsible for taking care of our children not our government. Not only was a shut down going to mean living on half a paycheck it was also going to mean no death benefits if something happened to my husband. I would have had to wait until the government was back up and running to receive any of the benefits we are entitled to. That was a nerve racking thought!
So we learned a lesson actually we learned two lessons as we watched this weeks political mess unfold. Brent and I are so blessed to have what we do. We both knew that we could live on nothing for a couple of weeks if we needed to and we knew that there was money in the bank if we needed it. We have also learned that you can not put a price on our family's security. We need to take measures to ensure that we are never caught off guard by something like this again. Well, I am off to go squeeze a few pennies out of our food budget and find any other areas of the budget that can be trimmed, cut and rearranged.
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