Personal Finance - Swamproot Style

I've gotten real keen on Personal Finance here lately. Part of that is my fear is that Baby Boomers like my 'rents are gonna blead social security dry and it will be up to me to provide for a dignified retirement. A lot of this realization comes from the fact that I am 37 and I have missed out on doubling just about everything that I stick in my retirement account from now on. But this is spilt milk. And this is the last time I'm going to cry about it.
I have recently become a rabid fan of Dave Ramsey. I subscribed to the commercial free 3-hour* subscription of his show (3 hours without commercials is 3X38 minutes). I post random crap on their myTMMO forums. I have drank the Kool-Aid. I am pissed off at debt and I'm not gonna take it. I've made my budget and set my goals.
It seems a lot of people who bother blogging about personal finance post their financial goals. I thought why not, nobody actually reads this fucking blog. I can say whatever the hell I want. But the idea is posting your financial goals and updating them in such a public forum will help to keep you on track.

So I'm trying to start off with a debt snowball, ala Dave Ramsey. I don't mind deviating though. I'm not actually "gazelle intense" but I am "really nervous antelope at the watering hole". I currently have 14000 dollars of credit card debt to pay off. I had accumalated about 7 thousand and my wife had accumalated another 7 thousand. Now "we" owe fourteen thousand. She was paying some high interest rate that was costing her around $100 a month. I transfered it to one of mine that offered a balance transfer at 4% and the interest is around $30. That, and combining our efforts has helped to pay off about $2000 in the first month or two of our endeavor.

I recently posted about where I deviated from the "pure" Dave Ramsey plan. I think I have room to manuveur as I have outlined without giving too much up to focus. I have a two tiered approach to the credit card debt that I would like to apply. First off is to get the balances on 3 higher interest cards (which have the lowest balances, btw), then pay a little more to an emergency fund, then pay off some lower interest balance transfers.

According to Dave's plan I shouldn't save for retirement while paying for debt, but I respectfully disagree if you have a small hole to dig yourself out of. I am currently thinking of opening IRA's using a minimum monthly deposit option that will allow a small monthly deduction to go to a mutual fund for as little as $25 or $50 dollars. I am going to do my next post on my analysis of this.

So that is the set up for the new series of personal finance articles that I am about to post about. They are really only of interest to myself and serve as a means to keep up with my research about my my investments. If they serve any purpose to any body else that might not be casing me or stealing my identity, that is merely a coincidence. So look for the yellowish rooster for personal finance.