Managing Your Credit Cards

So how do you manage your credit cards? We live in a world where it is difficult to travel, impossible to rent a car, and just extremely challenging to do a lot of things without a credit card. However, how do you protect yourself from debt, when financial hardship is never more than a few swipes of the credit card away? The problem with credit cards is you don’t have any tangible sense of what you are spending. With cash in your wallet, you know when you are reaching the end of your budget in an area. With credit cards, …

Doing Something Different

Have you ever seen a movie or TV show (usually a comedy) where the main character is trying to bail out a boat that is filling with water, but he never stops to plug the holes? My little Noah loves “Tom and Jerry” and they seem to have this scenario regularly. It is terribly funny to my kids, because no matter how hard Tom bails, the boat always sinks, and there is usually a very funny shark waiting. Many of you are in a boat just like Tom’s when it comes to debt. You are bailing like crazy and seem …

Baby Steps…

When Matt and I were first praying about having a baby, we felt very much that it was the right time to start our family, but we didn’t know what to do about insurance. Neither of us were on insurance, and for me to get on insurance meant that we would need to wait a year to get pregnant before insurance would cover any of the costs. We prayed about it a great deal and both felt complete peace that the Lord was going to provide for us and that we could go ahead and get pregnant. So, from that …

Where Your Heart Is…

OK, so I know that I am supposed to be talking about two week paychecks, but I really have something else on my heart for you today, so two week paychecks will just have to wait 🙂 Have you ever wondered what Paul was talking about in the Bible when he wrote to Timothy, “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” That verse is often quoted, “Money is the root of all evil”, but that is not …

The Shovel and the Hole

I received my first credit card solicitation when I was still in high school. I remember thinking they had the wrong person before I ripped it up and threw it away. But in college they began coming in earnest. I would get one a week, sometimes one a day advertising low balance transfer rates, and limited time low APR’s. Even then, I was concerned about messing up my good credit (thanks to my parents), and I never applied. However, many of my friends did apply and without a clue of how to manage the credit cards, they soon found themselves …