How I Plan To Get Back On Track Financially

The last few months have not been the best for my family in terms of sticking to a budget, using cash envelopes, throwing extra money to our debt snowball, and not using credit cards.

If you've been reading my blog you know that we started our "Journey To Financial Peace" in February 2007 when we discovered Dave Ramsey and discovered that we were $44,000 in debt, not including our home mortgage. Since then we have paid off more than $22,000. At one point we thought we might be able to be debt free by the end of this year - but due to some bad financial planning and decision making during the past few months, this now seems unlikely.

Here's how I plan to get back on track:

- Come Clean (Admit My Mistakes)
The first thing I am going to do is to figure out just how badly I screwed up. This means making a list of all the mistakes I've made. This means figuring out exactly how much we charged to our credit card, how much less we actually saved compared to how much we planned to save, and how much less we paid to our debts (snowballed) than we had planned. It won't be fun and it won't be pretty, but it is the first step to getting back on track.

- Forgive Myself
Life happens and things don't always go as planned. Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to admit them, learn from them, and move pasts them.

- Examine Each Mistake & Make A Plan To Avoid It In The Future
Next I am going to go down the list and examine each financial mistake that I've made. I'm going to think about why it happened. And I'm going to come up with a plan to keep it from happening again in the future.

I think the effort invested in following these steps will be like money in the bank. Wish me luck!