First Post

Ow!! I just banged my knee on the desk and it really hurts...

Well at least this is just superficial pain. I know that financial problems often cause real pain, personally and socially. I am vowing to try to live with as little of this pain as possible. I have a good start, I am debt-free and an engineering student enrolled in the University of Cincinnati. When I started moving toward this goal, I was 20 years old and had over $10,000 in debt. I am happy to say that now I am 22 years old and have an astounding $0 in debt and a personal net worth of well over anything I'm going to publish to the internet.

You are probably asking how I managed to pull this off, well thats a bit of a story... A huge misfortune in my life in many ways, but on the other hand, God has a way of making sure there is always a silver lining to any situation.

When I was 18 years old, I was involved in a life-threatening car accident that saddly took the lives of two of my best friends and left me in the hospital for a month and a half with many broken bones, two collapsed lungs, a lacerated spleen, ruptured bladder, and cheifly among them, a closed head injury that had me placed in a coma for a couple weeks. This accident was life altering in many, many ways. First of all and most importantly, it stole from me two of my best freinds who can never be replaced, less importantly, it also changed my life situation on a few fronts, It caused me to place college education on the back burner for a while I recovered from my physical injuries, which I'm happy to say took less than a year. The accident also changed a lot about the way I choose to look at my life and the path I am leading and provided me with a great opportunity to make significant changes (for the better) in my future possibilities in the form of a substantial pain and suffering settlement from my friend's (the driver of the car, and one of the two who parished) insurance company.

While this has left me in a better position than most students in college, if given the chance I would, in a second, give everything back just to have both of my friends back. Sittuation being what it is though, I have made a pledge to use this gift in the best way i know how to honor their memories.

Thats not to say that I diddn't make my mistakes with the money at first. One of the first things I did when I recieved the settlement was, buy a $30,000 car on a loan thinking that it wouldn't matter because I'd have the money to pay it off at any point. This logic worked for a while until I realized that with the rest of the money I still needed to pay for college and have an emergency fund of 6-months expenses. After I got smart and set asside this money, I realized that I diddn't have as much as I would have liked left over to invest for the future (which was the orriginal goal for the money).

Since then I've committed to living debt free and have discovered some tools to help me do this that I think are great and would urge anyone reading this to use. First of all, Dave Ramsey, yes the biggest name in personal debt reduction, Dave has provided a wonderful and very common-sense method to eliminating debt and living debt-free. Most of what I discuss in this blog will reference his methods and ideas. For those who are familiar with Dave Ramsey and his baby steps, I am now successfully completed with baby step #3 and working on investing 15% of my pay (wait a sec., I'm a student how does this work?... I'll explain in a little bit) into an IRA and building up my emergency fund.

So after that explanation, here is my current life sittuation and goals, I'm a debt-free student currently in my third of five years in engineering college vowing to live debt-free except for a mortgage when the time comes. I'm also currently an intern at Intel (which is that income I reffered to above) for 6 months out of the year; this is why my program is a five-year one. I'm also attempting to put my thoughts and actions through this journey on here. Lets see if it helps...