My First Blogger Entry

Today is Wednesday 03/12/08, and this is my first attempt at a blog entry. I have been reading others blogs, mostly personal finance, for about 2 months now and I feel I am ready to take the leap into the blogging world. As stated in the "about" section, I live in Michigan where the economy is dead last in the entire US. Like many others around me, I am in debt, I have a mortgage, a home equity line of credit, another small, (under $500.00) home improvement loan, one large credit card balance and a few other store credit cards. I had a balance on my Best Buy card for a digital movie camera that I purchased a while back and don't use nearly enough. This was the smallest of my debts, so I decided to go after this one first. It was small enough that after saving for a couple of weeks, I was able to pay this off. My first little victory. At the same time, I started funding my initial emergency fund. I opened an account at ING and set it to automatic. This means I have a set amount being transfered automatically into this account every 2 weeks. I also took a large chunk of my tax return and put it in the emergency fund account. This was to get this to a point that I was comfortable to start with and then I could get started right away on the debt reduction. It is a good thing that I set up this emergency fund because on Saturday, our electric cooktop died, I had to buy a new for about $500.00. The funds were there, no credit card charge, that was nice. Now back to debt reduction. Using Dave Ramsey'sdebt snowball theory, the next one in line would be the home improvement loan. I need to make a call to get the remaining balance on this. I might be able to pay this off with the rest of the tax refund if it is small enough. I believe that I am on the right track. I have been reading and learning from other personal finance blogs for a while now and I think I have a pretty good grasp of what needs to be done. Doing it? Well, we'll have to wait and see but I am pretty determined to make this happen and become totally debt free eventually.