Budget Update

First of all, Happy Veteran's Day and Thank You to those Veteran's out there!

Today I got a pleasant surprise when I found out I was paid early because of Veteran's Day. I was so excited that I spent my whole lunch hour online paying bills. Okay, I just re-read that sentence and I sound like a complete dork, but I don't really care! I'm hoping that if you're reading this, you are kinda obsessed with your finances, like I am, so perhaps you can appreciate it and maybe even do the same thing? :)

Anyway, this week I got our account down to 6 cents! Yippee :) I'm proud. That's progress from when I started this last week and felt a little embarrassed to be so low. Now, I hold my head up high. I even showed a friend my checkbook and how little I had in it! Way to go me. The way our budget is set up, my husband and I get paid on opposite Fridays. My checks go to our bills for the month and his checks go to gas and groceries, so his becomes our actual cash that we play with. I'm loving the envelope thing and I've already convinced my hubby to look for the least expensive gas and make sure to get a receipt so we can track it.

One thing that came up while paying the bills was that I had a little extra in our account after paying the mandatory bills. I was torn on transferring it to our pretty much non-existent savings account, or putting it on a credit card that has a very high interest rate. I decided to put it towards savings. This was a bit tough for me, but I know why it makes sense. As Dave Ramsey points out... if you don't have an emergency savings account to fall back on when an emergency happens (WHICH IT WILL), you're stuck putting more money on your credit cards. In theory it all seems perfectly logical... it was just tough to do for some reason. I guess I think of all that interest building up on the credit cards and I just want to pay it off fast. Again, the magic word this week for me appears to be patience!

Question : For those of you who follow Dave Ramsey's seven steps, was it hard for you to build up your emergency savings account? Did you feel a strong desire to throw every extra penny towards your debt instead?