Certified Financial Planner?

I’ve been really fired up about increasing my financial literacy ever since I finished Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover.  That was July 2011.  Heading into 2013, I’m slowly realizing that perhaps this is God’s plan for me.  My whole life I’ve been single minded about my career ambitions:  I just want to help people.  And I have in my current job.  But I want to do more, reach more people.  Almost everyone has to deal with money, budgets, debt and financial decisions at some point in their lives.  I think I could come along side some of those folks and lend a hand, share some knowledge and play cheerleader.

Last Saturday I was telling my Mom about this blog.  She encouraged me to try and find a way to pursue this further.  I explained that I would love to do what the host of We Owe What? does for a living.  We Owe What? is a television show on the Live Well Network (something I never heard of before I no longer subscribed to cable).  The host rescues a different family each episode by walking them through their budgets and finding flaws in their circumstance and gives suggestions for helpful changes.

I contacted We Owe What? via their facebook page and I got the following response:

We Owe What?

Hi Gina Mae! Thanks for the note. I think it is excellent that you are interested in financial education as a career. There are a lot of ways to get started. My route- through journalism- also included a Masters Degree in Business and a second Masters looking at women and money and I have also taken financial planning courses which were outside of my degree programs. This is my vocation in life so I intend to be a lifelong learner. That said- you don't need a Masters to get started. But I do recommend enrolling in a financial planning program. It really helps you see how all of the pieces of your financial life come together.
The best teachers I have had have been the people I have met on the job- from the folks struggling to get back on track to the businesses owners who came from nothing and made a fortune because of their hard work.
Let me know if you have other questions! Thanks for writing in!

So now I’m seriously thinking about following this advice.  I’m investigating the idea of becoming a certified financial planner.  It would open up a whole slew of opportunities for the future.  And maybe even provide me with a bump in salary that I could put towards our own financial goals.  Here’s hoping.

The master plan: Baby Steps

I read Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover twice during the summer of 2011.  I read it the second time because I loved it and wanted to soak up all the information I could before returning the book to the library.  See, I was already frugal not buying the book.

My artist husband made a visual aid of the seven baby steps that we have posted on our fridge.  We have built in mile stones on our debt snowball.  As we reach a mile stone we are rewarded with little gifts to ourselves.  Our next mile stone won’t be reached for a long long long time BUT I know it will feel great when we get there.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that our mortgage is listed in our debt snowball.  This is not the norm.  We have a ten year mortgage with a balloon payment due in September 2015.  The value of our condo is still way less than we owe so we cannot refinance and we cannot sell it.  So, we’re planning to pay it off before that September 2015 deadline.

It would be much more satisfying to pay off the student loans.  There are four student loans between two loan servicers and we could knock them off one at a time and build our snow ball the way it is meant to be done.  Instead, we tackle the behemoth mortgage.

Before my husband was laid off we were able to put an additional $1500 a month toward the mortgage.  Now, we’re putting our extra money into our emergency fund until we have $10,000.  This is just a precaution.  Hopefully my husband will secure a new job and we’ll go back to the old plan, transferring the emergency fund money to the mortgage in the process.  Until then, I get to pretend we’re on baby step 3.