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!

Money Makeover

Many weeks ago I won my first blog giveaway ever!  Laura, who writes Life Happens, was giving away a copy of Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, and I won!  I almost never participate in blog giveaways, mostly because I don't need to acquire random, useless stuff just for the sake of winning, and because I hate how with most giveaways there are all of these requirements to enter such as "Post a comment and then a Tweet linking back to my blog and refer at least 3 friends and then you're entered!"  Yeah, that's way to much work.

From www.daveramsey.com

But this giveaway was right up my alley.  All I had to do was comment, AND it was for something that I was actually really interested in receiving.  I probably would have borrowed the book from the library eventually, since I have been hearing so much about it the past few months.  But I WON! And now that I have it, I'm excited that I don't have to return it to the library because I've been marking it with post-its so that later on I can go back and refer to various sections when I get to that part of the plan.

Because - as I should have assumed - doing a "total money makeover" is a long-term plan.  It's really not the sort of thing where you can just read the book and then "BAM!" your financial problems are all over.  For most people, the TMM takes months and ever years (and in our case it will probably be years.)

So, I've been thoroughly enjoying the book, and although there are some parts that I think get a little preachy, it's still highly motivational and DH and I are planning on implementing many aspects of the TMM to our lives.

I plan on doing a series of posts over the next couple of weeks called the TMM posts.  I'm plan to discuss some of the "dos and don'ts" that Dave Ramsey discusses in the books, and which ones we follow and which ones we just have to ignore based on our personal situation.  I'm going to talk a little about our debt, and about how we got to where we are today, and finally, our current plan for tackling it all over the next couple of years. 

I learned a lot from reading this book, and I really do think that it will help us and hopefully some of you as well!  If you have any tips or other information to share after these posts, please do!