TMM - We Own Our Furniture!

It's been awhile since I've posted a TMM (Total Money Makeover) post, but that's mostly because this summer DH had to renovate his rental property, and all of our extra money was going towards that.  But the renovations are over, and as of the end of August, we will finally, officially own ALL of our furniture!! Woo hoo!!!

That might not seem like a big deal to most of you, but for us, it's huge.  When we purchased our first home together, all of the furniture that we had was total crap, except for the full-sized bed that I just purchased two years earlier.  This meant that in order to furnish an entire new home, we would need to buy a LOT of furniture.

It turns out I don't take many pictures of our furniture, but here's the love seat, end table and coffee table

We decided to do it all in one fell swoop and went to Roomful Express.  We took advantage of their 5 years no financing offer and purchased roughly $7,000 worth of furniture.  Items that we purchased include but are not limited to...
- Sleigh bed
- Pillow-top mattress with box spring
- 2 matching dressers and a nightstand
- Sofa
- Love seat
- Coffee table and end tables
- Glass dining room table with 6 chairs
- Wine rack
- Rug

Hmm... maybe that's all. I can't really remember.  Anyway, the furniture was great, and we loved it. But then a year or so later we moved to our current home and we suddenly had an enormous finished basement to furnish as well.  So we went back to Roomful Express and they let us add on a $1000 couch, love seat, ottoman, coffee table, and end tables set to our "free financing" offer so that we wouldn't need to pay for that upfront either.

Murphy enjoying the chair that was part of new downstairs furniture set

I know that financing - whether it's zero percent interest or not - is not recommend at all by financial advisers or by people like Dave Ramsey.  This is one of those areas where - when reading the book - I had to say to myself, "This is what worked for us, and I'm glad we did it the way we did." 

The reason that financial adviser people like Dave Ramsey don't like free-financing deals is because most people don't pay the balance off in time to avoid finance charges.  We are (we like to think, at least) smart enough to do that, so we never paid a dime in financing.  Sure, our furniture isn't worth the same amount of money that it was 5 years ago, but I'm not really worried about that.  We're planning on it keeping it for a long time, and now it's ours, free and clear.

The furniture debt was the smallest debt that we owed on, and we focused on paying that one off first so that we could get it out of the way and then put that money towards something else.  Our next goal - would we should reach relatively soon - is to pay off DH's car.  Although it wouldn't normally be the debt to pay off in Dave Ramsey's mind, we had to prioritize because of a stupid mistake that we made a few months ago.  More on that in the next TMM post!