Tag: Bacall

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Finance

The Day, The Name

My post titles are starting to have a pattern to them…I’m not sure I like it…but hey that’s what is in my head right now. PS I wanted to let you know, I did not write a blog post last week, but I did however write the About Me page and that’s basically the same thing…right? Anyway I thought I would tell you a little bit more about the day I decided to write this blog and where it’s name came from.

I have to admit, I should have written this sooner because the day or days that I decided to start writing this blog have become a bit foggy. It was a special day though because I got to spend my whole day chatting with some very special ladies that I don’t spend nearly enough time with.

First, I went to lunch with a dear friend, Alyssa, who is preggo, which is inspiring in and of itself. (For those of you who don’t know me, I am on this journey to pay off debt because I desperately can’t wait to have kids and really want to/feel called to stay home with them…which is something I can’t do with all this DEBT.) Talking and just being so overjoyed and excited with her renewed my resolve. I just LOVE time with her! And now I can’t get enough of her little baby bump too!

Then I got to have pastry with another dear friend, Jane and her sweet little one Felicity. Jane is super inspiring to begin with, her and her husband along with their two little ones have worked to pay off all of their debt (we went to Fresno Pacific University together) and they have just succeed in becoming debt free!!!!! They were just one payment away from debt free on the day we got pastry! And she gave me a novel idea…pray for the money to pay off the debt…hmm well as a Christ-follower you may be thinking…DUH!!! Don’t get me wrong I have prayed a lot about student loan debt… A LOT.. I prayed that we would be disciplined enough to payoff the debt, I prayed that we would make enough money to pay it off, I prayed that I would not make paying off debt my idol, and other things like that. I would often wonder, can I win the lottery or win the money off of HGTV (my favorite channel) or the dream house, all with the only thought being to pay off the debt, BUT I never just asked God to provide the means. AND that people was the exact moment, with Jane’s words, that I began to think maybe the Lord was asking me to trust Him to payoff this debt.

This thought only continued to be confirmed as I then went to visit my friend Alex to celebrate her birthday! We sat and talked about debt, teaching, marriage, and life in general. Throughout this conversation we kept coming to the consensus that trusting God was the answer, the answer to EVERYTHING. He would get us through. As we were talking, my mind was drawn back to Jane’s statement of praying for the money over and over.

The next day…New Year’s Eve, Luke and I were spending a much needed lazy day at home together. We were watching either The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, well Luke was sleeping and I was contemplating the conversations from the day before, living with my in-laws, paying off debt, and what the Lord was trying to tell me. I decided to take a shower…my best thinking, praying, contemplating, and such always happen in there…plus I needed to get ready for our New Year’s Eve dinner. Clarity aka the Holy Spirit, struck me then and there. Like I’ve mentioned before, I struggle with faith and trust, but in that moment and only in that moment so far, I felt sure and ready to go on this journey. See we plan to move out of my in-laws in or around December and house payments/rent and other responsibilities will come, especially financially (my in-laws are blessing us so much!). So we won’t have the ability to pay on the loans like we do now. And I just felt the Lord asking, will you trust me to make it happen. I thought Yeah! Yeah! Yeaaaah! the Lord can do it and so I shared my thoughts with Luke. He immediately was on board and really got this blog up and running… he may have thought the details were a little crazy ($54,000 in one year is a LOT of money), but here we are :).

The name of the blog picks up right where this story left off. Maybe a minute after I agreed to trust the Lord and shared the news with Luke, I began to doubt…did the Lord REALLY say He would make it happen? Did He really mean $54,000? Is this all in my head? Wishful thinking? Does the Lord really tell us such specific things? Oh NO!!! What if I just thought this all up and God is up there thinking…this girl??? And they just kept coming…all the doubts over and over. I began to preach the gospel to myself and to pray about my word and trust just kept coming up, at least as much as the doubts. (See what I’m talking about preaching the gospel to myself and my word for the year here). And that is how the name Trusting in the Dark was born. It’s sometimes dark here…I don’t know everything the Lord is calling me to do, I don’t know if He has specifically asked me to trust Him for $54,000, but I DO know He has called me to TRUST HIM this year and He has asked me to ask Him to provide. So I am here, little ‘ole me, trusting in the dark, not able to see all the details, yet trying and learning how to trust through His amazing grace.

Please pray for my trust and faith to abound.

PPS hoping for some exciting debt news next week! Stay tuned!!!

 

Categories
Finance

The Plan, The Purpose

So my original plan was to write a post at least once a week and well, as you can see, that resolution went down the drain in week two…oops! Well…here I am trying to pick that goal back up. (If you are reading this, for the love of Pete, please keep me accountable ;).

Anyhow I would like to share the details of our plan and the purpose or at least my current purpose for this blog. I started to write, God feel free to change up the purpose as you see fit and then I remembered I’m kind’ve a recovering control-freak and realized that scared the poop out of me. Fear aside, Lord let the purpose always be yours over mine (just in case you were wondering that’s the trusting part I’m working on/struggling with). Since we’re talking about it, let’s start with the purpose. I need a record of this journey and that is the whole big grand purpose…not just the paying off of these loans, but much more importantly the journey of trusting the Lord, having faith in Him, and His will for our lives. So often, actually always…ALWAYS, He is faithful and maybe in the moment we (by we I mean me) realize He is faithful and more than worthy of our complete trust in Him. Then life continues to happen and His faithfulness slips from our mind and worse yet our hearts. At least that happens to me, a lot. I vaguely remember from the recesses of my mind that The Lord has over and over again, for no other reason than He loves me, personally and intimately shown me how faithful He is, but I can’t quite recall the details, the feeling. So this blog is to stop that ridiculousness from happening. (Who am I that the all mighty God should pursue me!?!?!) And that is my purpose everybody, all four of my friends whom read this because you love me 😉

Also if The Lord decides that someone, somewhere can benefit from this blog in someway, even better!

As for the plan, the plan…the PLAN! I guess the plan is our budget, budgeting is no joke BTW.  While Luke and I were engaged, we were very very blessed by Sequoia Community Church in Fresno. The church did a group study of Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University and we happened to join the group. Thankfully we started our marriage already done with baby step number one, a $1,000 emergency fund. But more than four years later we are still on baby step number two, pay off all debt. You can find all 7 baby steps here. It took us a while to get our feet off the ground with our debt snowball. We had to figure out how to work together as newlyweds to even do anything with money, make a budget and stick to it, then I went back to school, then I found a job, and most currently we moved in with my in-laws (what a blessing!). Now we have refined, cut, and trimmed our budget.

We do our budget twice a month, about the 1st and 15th. I get paid at the beginning of the month and Luke gets paid twice, around the beginning and middle of the month. With this plan we decided to make sure we sit down together and write out the budget. It is much easier for one person to do it alone, but that isn’t the best money saver or relationship builder.

Here is about what our budget looks like:

Tithe

Groceries

Gas

Car Insurance

Student Loans (principal and interest payments)

Phones

3 other small personal bills

Dog Money (food, vet, medicine, etc)

Miscellaneous (doctors appointments, hair cuts, prescriptions)

Then we have our “fun money”:

Eating Out

Date Night

Luke’s Fun Money

BaCall’s Fun Money

*If you would like to know amounts for these things feel free to email or comment below.

The list is in this order because this is the order we pay them in, I guess it is our order of importance. Our tithe, groceries, gas, dog money, miscellaneous money, and fun money are repeated on both halves of the month. The car insurance, student loans, phone bill, and the 3 other bills are split between the halves of the month. Our fun money is rather small to make sure we are putting as much as possible towards our debt, but in FPU (Financial Peace University) it suggests you do this so you are not too tempted to overspend. It has worked very well for us. The budget is flexible, if something unexpected happens we can change it, but our goal is to stick as closely as possible to the budget. With this budget we have about $2,800 extra to put towards our student loan debt.

To summarize our goal is to follow the above budget as closely as possible and pay $2,800 extra a month towards the debt and trusting The Lord for the rest. We are hoping and praying to payoff between $54,000 – $66,000 in 12 months. We move out of my in-laws in about 12 months FYI.

Just to give you and myself an idea of what that really means, I used a loan calculator to see what that looks like. With the numbers I just shared the calculator said it would take about 1 year and 6 months to pay off the $54,000 and about 1 year and 9 months to payoff the $65,000.

We are trusting the Lord!

 

Categories
Finance

A New Year and a New Adventure

Welcome to my new adventure! I say new adventure, but I’m really hoping this is more like the third part of The Hobbit, the home stretch of a journey with new adventure of it’s own. Don’t worry, I’m long winded, I’ll catch you up on parts one and two. This adventure is about faith, trusting the Lord, and debt. It seems odd or unusual to write that sentence… faith, trust, and DEBT. But that is exactly what this adventure is about…

THE CURRENT ADVENTURE aka Part 3 of The Hobbit:

December 30th is the day this leg of the adventure started, I spent some time with some godly women whom the Lord used to plant prayers, thoughts, ideas, curiosity, and most importantly faith into my heart. Henceforth was born this plan:

Luke (see part 1 & 2 for who that guy is) and I plan to spend the next 12 months working our tails off and (more so) trusting the Lord to pay off $54,000 in debt. As you might have guessed we don’t have  or make all the money it would take to pay this off, hence the faith and trust. (If you have really big faith pray for $66,000).  More on the current adventure to come.

*It is really nerve-wracking and quite vulnerable to put these numbers online. Please be kind with this knowledge.

Part 1:

This journey started in 2004, maybe even before… wanting to live for Christ was my intention, but I didn’t know how to or where to turn. There were things: hurts, abuses, and people in my life that  hindered me and some that I allowed to hinder me in my journey towards and with Christ. My seventeen year old self, with much thought and prayer, decided escape was the best route. I did well in school and maybe I should have applied to many schools, cheaper schools, but Azusa Pacific University was on my mind and in my heart. A private, Christian university sounded like the perfect place to get rid of and escape from those things and also a great place to grow. And I did!

I grew in my faith by leaps and bounds and started the lifelong journey of eradicating those things from within me. It was a long, hard, tumultuous, exciting, fun, and humbling year. Some unforeseen circumstances led me to only spend the one year at Azusa. I continued my higher education at a slightly (very very slightly) less expensive private Christian school, Fresno Pacific University. I loved my time there and continued to grow and mature in my faith, which led me to an amazing church, wonderful Christian friends, and to one of my greatest blessings, my husband Luke.

Maybe you see where this is going or maybe you already know because you’ve spent at least a minute with me… Either way the answer is a big fat student loan… student loansssssss, I should say. Tens of thousands, lots of tens of thousands of dollars. I try really hard to be smart with money…to be a good steward, to honor the Lord with my spending, saving, and such. But lots of tens of thousands of dollars in debt does not sound honoring to me. I struggle with this a lot…was I not following the Lord when I took out these loans? Did I mishear His direction? Or was this just His plan? I honestly don’t know, but here I am and I can say I’ve grown closer to the Lord through my time at both universities and He is molding me into who He wants me to be.

Apparently who He wants me to be next is someone who has stronger faith, trusts Him completely, and who has no or at the very least much less debt.

Part 2:

In 2010 I married Luke and we started dreaming of our future and what the Lord has for us to do. We decided/discovered that adoption, having children, being debt-free, and possibly having some sort of home that we care for/ invite people into make the list. So we decided in August 2014 to move in with Luke’s parents who graciously obliged. Thus far we have lived in their beautiful home and have been greatly blessed by them for five months and have paid off about $10,000 in student loans (that is not part of the $54,000 we are aiming for in the next 12 months).  As you can see much more hard work and faith are needed to make this happen and we are ready to see the faithfulness of the Lord in however he sees fit to show it.