The First Baby Step

Well, I’m off to a very slow start, but I’ve made a little bit of progress.

I’ve been able to apply $132.09 to our credit card debt!

Here’s the breakdown:

$ 0.15 – a quarterly dividend check from a single share of stock that my husband owns

$17.18 – a quarterly Ebates check (What’s Ebates? Stay tuned for a future post.)

$54.00 – I went through the house and gathered up all of the loose change!

$12.08 – I logged into my PayPal account and found money from something that I sold back in January

$48.68 – I sold a basket on Ebay and after all fees this is what I’m left with

Only $134,867.91 to go!

Our Goal

$135,000.00

That’s a scary number!

What does it really mean? It means that we need to save or earn an extra…

$27,000.00 per year

$2,250.00 per month

$519.23 per week

$103.85 per day (5 days per week)

Now $103.85 is a much less scary number! At this point I know I can’t earn or save that much every day, but hopefully the things that I plan to put in place over the next six months to a year will help me achieve that goal and more.

Stay tuned for what those things are…

So What’s Our Five Year Plan?

My husband and I own a small business that we purchased in December of 2010. It has not been what we expected and neither of us are enjoying it as much as we thought we would. We are barely earning enough money to get by. Some months we do not earn enough. We are deeply in debt and with four children, this debt weighs on us heavily.

Last week we took a day off to reassess the business and our goals. We came up with “Our Five Year Plan”!

So what’s the plan? Over the next five years, we are going to pay off our nearly $35,000 credit card debt and save $100,000 to start a new business. How are we going to do this? With a lot of blood, sweat and tears I’m sure. It will happen baby step by baby step.

Why five years? We expect it to take that long to save $135,000 and in five years all four of our children will be in school full time which will allow me to focus most of my time on starting our new business.

I will share each baby step and our progress here on Our Five Year Plan, including ways that we are saving money or earning extra cash. I will also share details of our current business and what we’ve learned along the way.

What’s your five year plan?