Monday, January 26, 2009

Tax documents are in!

We have recieved all of our necesary tax documents and have packaged them up to go my mother-in-law. She runs her own buisness doing peoples taxes. We get the nice family discout---Free! Plus we get the fast family speedy service---jump to the head of the line!

She is so fast, we will likely see our stuff done with-in the week. I was looking in our quicken accounts and discovered we received nearly 8,000 back last year.

If we get roughly the same back this year then we will be able to pay off our last credit card and a personal family loan. We borrowed money from my parents last year with the deal that we would not have to pay them the $1,000 back until tax season. We had a tree in our back yard that had to be removed. It was a huge pin oak and the roots were hitting the foundation of our house. It cost a little over $1,000 the remove it and rather than putting it on a card they were gracious enough to offer us a free of interest loan with the condition we would pay them with our tax refund this year. The other personal family loan is to another set of grandparents. We bought our house 5 years ago and it needed new windows really bad. We did not have the money for them and the granparents insisted on paying for them. We made the same deal with them, that we pay them $1,000 each year at tax time. So this year we will pay them $1,000 and owe $2,000 still. We have never not paid them so everyone is fine with these loans. Still, I will be glad to be rid of them just the same!

You may be wondering what we did with last years tax money. Well we paid our personal loan and we paid off a credit card with it then too. We were down to no credit card debt. We racked up our credit card again redoing two bathrooms in our house and taking a vacation to the beach. We were not planning to spend so much on our bathrooms. It is sort of a funny story I will share in another post.

But I will be honest, we are bad about clearing our credit card debt just to turn around and jack it up again.

We hope to be different this year. We plan to do no more remodeling to our house that we can not pay cash for immediately. We have no plans of anything big, but we do need some small things here and there. Trim in a few places, one bathroom needs a new light fixture/mirror and faucet. It also needs painted. But nothing major like we have done in the past.

We also are not planning to go on any major vacations. We do hope to take our kids on a few day trips like to an amusement park or water park. But no big trips like to the beach or on our annual family renunions to Gatlinburg TN.

We have watched a lot of Dave Ramsey videos and are now seeing the error of our ways. We no longer wish to live paycheck to paycheck. So even if appears that we are one of those poeple who will not succeed at this debt free thing I hope you will stick with us through this journey. I started this blog for an incentive....to have people prod us along and keep us on the straight but narrow path to a debt free life!

4 comments:

  1. Good for you. I can't wait to do our taxes! We are waiting on a few investment documents, which of course have to be issued by Jan. 31. I have the feeling they are going to take exactly that much time to be ready!

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  2. It's great that you are getting so much money back and that you have a plan for where it is going. I think that if you follow Dave's plan, you can't go wrong.

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  3. Good luck! that is fantastic that you are seeing what you need to do in the future so that you don't repeat old habits ... i need to learn that!

    we are just waiting for our interest statement on our home - blah - it usually takes them forever!!!! but we are ready when they are!

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  4. That is very exciting - I hope your refund let's you knock your debt out! I have no idea how our taxes will look this year...my wife started her own busienss late last year so I'm hoping that will help. I'll keep you posted!
    KDB

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