Adventures In St Joe

Quite awhile ago we got connected with Dave Ramsey's financial advice and have been big fans ever since. In that time I've also seen Dave speak in person twice at the Catalyst Conference and thoroughly enjoyed him both times. In fact, the first year I went he was the best speaker there.

Dave has some very simple steps to get people headed toward financial freedom, and it's something I wish we would've learned before we got married. First off is to set up a $1,000 emergency fund. The reason for that is that if you decide to immediately try to get out of debt, what do you do when an emergency comes up? You likely get into more debt. So you do whatever necessary to get your $1,000 emergency fun in place as quickly as possible.

After that you start working on paying off your debt. Dave suggests the "debt snowball" method, which is a very good idea. Basically you pay the minimum on all your debts except for the smallest one. On the smallest one, you pay as much as you possibly can each month. Once that one's paid off, you take the amount you were paying on the smallest and apply it to the new smallest. As you pay off debts, the amount you're paying toward each one snowballs until you've got them all paid off. Sweet!

After you're debt free (except for a mortgage, that comes later), you start working on an extended emergency fund. The amount depends, but it should cover four to six months of living expenses. We've had this done for several months and have been dragging our feet in moving on to step four: investing for retirement.

The main thing about investing is that I don't know anything about it. It seems like you could go in a thousand different directions, which left us paralyzed. Where do you start? A few weeks ago a Dave-approved financial adviser was at our church to talk about investments and we set up an appointment with him for yesterday.

Things didn't start out so well. Our appointment was at 9am in St Joe, so we took Allison to school and then hit the road. The office is in downtown St Joe, which is an area we're unfamiliar with. That being the case, we arrived early since we were able to find the place with no problems. He wasn't in the office yet, but the secretary assured us he would be there at 9am. No problem, we'll just wait for ten minutes.

9:00 comes and no adviser. 9:05 rolls around and the secretary starts to act surprised, so she tries tracking him down on his cell phone. No luck. 9:10, she tries him at home. No answer. 9:15, I decide to start reading some of these Forbes magazines laying in front of me. I now understand what's wrong with Nascar's financial set up! Finally, at 9:30, we decide to leave. This is very disappointing, as we've set up somewhere for Allison to go after school just to make this trip, and now we'll have to do it all over again.

So we take off, and after we're about five minutes down the road, I get a call on my cell phone. Somehow he thought the meeting was at 10 and promised he would be at the office soon. We turned around and got there at about 9:45.

As we pulled back in to the building, we parked at the same two hour parking we'd been at before. The exact same spot. I wondered aloud if that was a good idea, but was already a little bit annoyed at having left and returned, so I was just eager to get inside.

Once we finally connected at 10am, things went quite well. I'm now the proud owner of a Roth IRA with a pretty diversified portfolio. It's not worth much, but it feels good to finally be started. He did a very good job answering our questions and I think he gave us some great advice.

Our initial plan was to hit Home Depot and Target while we were in St Joe, but we were now out of time and would simply have to head back to Maryville. As we're walking back to the van, what's that on the windshield? It can't be! Yes, it is. A $7 parking ticket. Apparently leaving for ten minutes in the middle of your 3 hour stint doesn't keep you from getting a ticket.

No, $7 isn't a big deal, it's more of the principle of the thing. We were never there for more than two hours and shouldn't have a ticket at all. Of course we'd have to go back to St Joe to protest the ticket, and it's cheaper to pay $7 than the gas (and time) we'd lose otherwise.

It's funny how annoying something like that can be. A simple mix up of our meeting time kept us from getting to Home Depot (to buy some laminate flooring) and also got us this irritating ticket. But what happened today? Since we missed Home Depot, we decided to try our local Sutherlands out. Not only did we get a better deal (who knew?) but the stuff we bought ended up being on sale as well! That right there saved us another $100.

So now I'm glad we got detained in St Joe yesterday, but I still wish it hadn't cost me $7 :P