Financial Peace,The Journey! (Part 1)
Greetings Emerald Chasers, I am excited to write my first post for Emerald Chase LLC. What an honor it is to participate in the mission and vision of this amazing company. I have been invited to join the Emerald Chase team in order to provide financial tips, budgeting tools, debt elimination techniques, money hacks and to share our experiences with “Beating Debt & Building Wealth”.
First let me introduce myself and my family. I am a trained financial coach with over 15 years of experience coaching, encouraging and motivating over 1500 families to get control of their finances and build wealth. We are a retired military family that recently completed 28 years of service in the U.S Army. “Airborne, All the Way!” As a blended family with 14 children, three are His, nine are Hers and two are Theirs........we had an amazing time with raising and launching 12 out of the 14 children into the world. However, what is more amazing is that we are completely Debt Free, minus the house. How did we get to Debt Free Land, you ask? Let me explain.............
First and foremost only one of us had the debt load and the other had zero debt. Tony, with three children had over $30,000 worth of debt , while his lovely wife with nine children had 0 debt while having a approximate annual income of less than $32,000. “What In the World!” How can this be, I asked her? I waited with excitement to discover this amazing, incredibly complicated and sophisticated financial plan, which fed, housed, clothed and transported a family of 10, without debt, or public assistance she dropped the bomb................BOOM!
She told me to work, live within my means, avoid debt at all costs, be content with what I already had and do the following for the rest of my life........Give 10%, Save 10% and Live off of the remaining 80%. More to follow...........
This answer threw me for a loop and was so easy to understand, but hard to execute. I was immediately intrigued, filled with the desire to be in her position financially and as I was planning to ask for her hand in marriage; becoming an instant father/step-father of 12 children under the age of 17. I wanted to ensure that we would be able to provide for our family, plan for the future and enjoy the present with the income that we earned.
I knew I needed to pay attention to this money thing and make it work hard for our family, instead of working hard and never experiencing any financial gain.
The first thing we did was take notice of where we currently were financially, writing and tracking all our monies and then we had to come up with goals that we both agreed upon to achieve. This led to our first ever money budget meeting. We had to ensure we knew where the money was coming from, but more importantly we had to decide exactly where the money would go. We discovered the "Zero Based Budget" method.
This “Journey” was absolutely amazing and we will continue to share our story in Part 2......coming soon! Join us as we move from Large family in Lager debt to Large family with no debt.....Freedom!
