As a kid, I would go once a week to the library in the summer time. I loved to read and it was a good waste of a few hours for my stay at home mom to occupy me. As I got older, she’d drop me off for a few hours while she ran errands or did some grocery shopping.

As a self-proclaimed bookworm, I am embarrassed to admit that I had not been in my current town’s library, except when voting, since moving here in 2011. This is extra embarrassing, as the library is legit five minutes from our house. That horrible crime has was rectified in 2018 and I am now a proud library card carrying member of my community. They even gave me a free tee shirt when I signed up!

PoniesandFIREjr is 5 years old and the two of us now have a weekly date to the library on Monday nights when they stay open late. We’ve gone the past six months and we are loving it! The great things I remember about libraries from my childhood are the same and I have found some exciting new free stuff in ours too!

Here are my six reasons to check out your local library for some FREE entertainment:

1.       This is obvious, but BOOKS! I LOVE to read and if I’m being honest, I probably qualify as a book hoarder. The library gives me an unending supply of free books for myself and for bedtime stories for PoniesandFIREjr.
2.        My library has hundreds of movies on DVDs available to check out. This week we borrowed Cars 2. Last week was Lady and the Tramp. It will take poniesandFIREjr years to get through them all!
3.        On the same vein, DVDs of TV shows and stuff Mr. poniesandFIRE and I would want to watch too! Seriously – everything from Friends, to Breaking Bad to anything in between.
4.        My library has puzzles you can check out! I have no idea if this is a normal thing or not, but how cool! I love puzzles, as does my son, but I have zero desire to ever pay money for them or have them permanently take up space in my house. PROBLEM SOLVED!
5.        My library hosts free community events for kids. There are afternoon movies, crafts and back in October a super cool presentation from a wildlife rescuer that included a real life SLOTH!
6.       Librarians are awesomely nice! Our local librarian lets poniesandFIREjr run the scanner himself to check out his own books and movies and he thinks that is incredibly cool. They also give great suggestions of books we might love. Last, but not least, they sometimes give out free snacks! So many wins!
7. Our library is dog friendly. I suspect this isn't the case everywhere, but how cool is it to be able to bring you dog? 
 
All in all, there are so many things to love about libraries, most of which is that they are in EVERYONE’S budget! In honor of National Library Week, take some time to swing by your local library and check out all the amazing free stuff they have to offer.

Confession time - we do not follow the Dave Ramsey plan strictly. When we first started out, we were pretty strict with the plan, but we NEVER stopped contributing to our 401Ks. 

At first, our reason for not stopping was the hassle of the paperwork of stopping, but the more we researched and learned about personal finance, we came to peace with the choice to contribute up to the match amount during our Baby Step 2 journey of paying down our consumer debt. As we paid things off, we eventually upped our contributions and we now contribute 15% each to our plans and I receive a 4% match. My husband receives a 3% match.

If you have a 401k plan offered through your employer, I strongly recommend contributing, even if you start small. What makes a 401k so great? Let me share my thoughts with you.

1. They are portable. Anything you put away goes with you, even if you leave your employer in the future, unlike a pension plan.

2. The contributions go in PRE-TAX, which reduces your taxable income. This reduces what you owe in taxes and reduces how it hits your paycheck. 

3. Should you pass away, the funds in your 401k can be passed along to your spouse or children. 

4. No taxes are owed on the 401k or it's growth until you start making withdrawals. Likely, when you retire and take withdrawals, your tax rate will be lower than when you are working, so this will be a savings. Whatever stays invested, stays tax free. 

5. Many employers offer a match, which is a 100% return on investment when you invest up to the match. Where in life can you get a guaranteed 100% return?!? Really is not something to be missed. 

6. Compound interest. By starting early in your career even small contributions can compound into a large amount of money by the time you retire. If this is confusing to you, take a moment to google "Story of Ben and Arthur Dave Ramsey." This is a great showcasing of what can happen over time, even with small figures.

If you have the option to invest in a 401k at your work, start today! Don't let confusion or the hassle of paperwork hold you back, sign up and get started. Even if all you do is put in 3%, start there and raise it another percent each few months.

I get it, budgets sound hard. Budgets sound boring. Budgets sound restrictive. This is wrong, however. Budgets equal freedom.

If the word "budget" is giving you pause, call it something else, call it a money flow plan. The name doesn't matter, the awareness of your finances is what matters.

We do a weekly cashflow budget, because we are paid weekly. This just made sense for us. Every Thursday I pull up the excel file and update our numbers and project out each week for the next couple months. My income is steady from my job and my husbands typically varies quite a bit, so we budget off of my regular amount and what a low week would be for my husband.

The chart starts with what we currently have in the bank and then I add in our income for that week. I have line items for the following expenses below:
Daycare
Groceries
Gas
Mortgage
Truck Payment
Utilities
Insurance
Savings
Etc.
I then have a subtotal at the end of the week and we always try to stay above $1,000 in our checking account as an extra buffer/emergency fund.

As the week progresses, if things change, I can easily update my numbers and see how that effects both our current week and in the coming weeks. 

Each week when I do a budget update, I also update a list of our assets (401k balances, savings accounts, 529, home equity, etc). This part of budgeting is more fun, seeing the numbers grow, so this keeps me motivated each week to do the budget. 

If excel isn't your thing, check out Dave Ramsey's Budgeting App EveryDollar or just bust out a pen and some paper and get to work. It may takes some months to get the hang of doing it, but no worries. No one's budget is every perfect. The point is to have a plan and an awareness of what you are doing with your money and where it is going. 

In 2011 we purchased a foreclosed home. It was huge, it was 111 years old and it hadn't been properly winterized, we quickly found out, when we turned on the water and found burst pipes. 

We had not been financially prepared to buy a home. We had other debt (student loan, credit cards, vehicle loans) and my then fiancée took out a 401k loan to come up with the rest of the cash for the down payment. We did so many things wrong in buying our home, but I was in love with the home and everyone we talked to agreed we were getting an incredible deal on the home.

The house had been purchased by the prior owners for $260,000, but it was foreclosed on and with the mortgage crisis at the time, loans were hard to come by and we ended up buying the house for $168,000. Somehow, we were able to roll in our closing costs and down payment into the mortgage through some special first time buyers deal and ended up with a mortgage of $178,238. We got a 30 year mortgage and an interest rate of 4.75%. 

As soon as we moved in, I started to realize we might be in over our heads. The house needed a ton of work. We dropped almost all our cash reserves on a pellet stove and fixing the burst pipes that first month. We were planning a wedding and I had no clue how we would pay for it. 

A few months after moving into our home, I found myself googling "how to pay off debt sooner." The first results I found were for Dave Ramsey. I quickly went down the rabbit hole and was obsessed with paying off our debt to create space between us and living paycheck to paycheck. 

If you stumbled across by blog by chance, you may be wondering what is "FIRE" that I keep referencing. 

F.I.R.E stands for Financial Independence Retire Early and is a movement that focuses on a goal rather than a specific way to achieve the goal. I came upon this from the old Dave Ramsey/TMMO forums, where people occasionally mentioned enjoying Mr. Money Moustache. I checked out Mr. Money Moustache's blog and was blown away. 

Prior to his blog, I was feeling like we were moving financially in the right direction, but it would be a long haul and we were decades away from slowing down. After reading his blog, I realized there were other options. I could change my financial picture and put us in a situation where we could drastically change what our lives look like in 10 years. 

For us, we want to slow down. We may not actually retire fully, but most following this movement don't intend to save 25x their annual expenses and then sit on a beach until they die. The goal is to put yourself in the financial situation where you can pursue the things you enjoy and not be trapped by bills/lack of savings/upcoming unplanned expenses. 

We have set a goal of FIRE by 2025. For us, we need to be 100% debt free (including our house) and have significant funds in both our 401ks, 529 and outside investments. It is a stretch goal, but 

Welcome to PoniesandFIRE, which is going to be a blog looking at personal finances in general and my family's personal journey to reach Financial Independence. 

I am a 34 year old with a super hardworking husband and one child. Together we are striving towards some very big financial goals. In the short term, we want to become 100% debt free and in the slightly longer term, we want to reach a point where we are financial secure enough to live off of passive income.

I currently have two streams of income. My first is a full time job for a large scale horse farm, where I primarily work in the office, but can be found doing anything from riding, to working with baby horses to shoveling lots of manure. I also run my own side business teaching riding lessons, training horses and selling horses.

My husband works in the railroad industry and has nothing to do with horses, being somewhat allergic. 

Together, we started the financial education journey through Dave Ramsey, after purchasing a foreclosed house in 2011 and realizing we were drowning in bills and completely overwhelmed. Since then, we have followed quite a bit of the Dave Ramsey financial advice, but also branched out into learning from a multitude of sources.

I am looking forward to discussing our journey and what we learn along the way!