Dave Ramsey would be proud...

...of his hick followers Josh an' Annie!

Mr. Ramsey is one profound speaker, teaching his readers and listeners how to become debt free and make their money begin to grow for the future. In this post if you don't know much about Dave, you'll get to know more as I use his quotes and ideas.

Josh loves him and back when we had more money we became "gazelle intense" - making it our highest priority to do nothing except get out of debt as fast as possible. We "lived like no one else so that someday we can live like no one else!" It was difficult at first to shop second hand when I was used to buying brand new - especially when I thought we could afford new things. But that's the thing - if you looked at our debt we honestly couldn't afford the new...it just seemed like we could.

So when we had money and life was happy go lucky we started living like finances were tight. And they were after we put all our extra money towards debt reduction. We paid off four big debts in 5 months!

While we were paying off this debt we kept an emergency fund of $1,000 ready to use because Murphy's law is always happening. Dave always referred to it in his book -"If anything bad can happen it will." And guess what? He was right!

I am so glad we kept our back up fund and continue to keep it up. While we were ecstatic about paying off those debts, as soon as we thought we were home free "Murphy came to visit" as Dave puts it.

• Josh's care needed new brakes and tons of other work
• Our cable needed buried and trenched
• David needed a new carseat

And now our refrigerator just died! Hello Murphy, would you like a home in our residence? But in order to "live like no one else" we are simply going to use a very old - but working - refrigerator - buh bye Mr. Murphy!

Where did we get this blessing in the form of a refrigerator?

Now, this is going to reveal the very hick part of me, but here I go! Josh owns a couple rental properties in town and someone gave him an old refrigerator to keep, thinking he could use it if one of his properties' fridge's died. Instead of putting it in storage Josh wanted to keep it on our screened in porch. So there it sits, next to all his tools, the goat feed, and plumbing/electrical supplies.

As our fridge and freezer quit on us I simply moved everything out to our porch! Praise the Lord for his providence! Now here is the truly redneck coming out - I almost couldn't fit all our food in the freezer because Josh's woodchuck was taking up the entire top shelf!

Yes, he has a frozen rodent in our freezer. On the bottom shelf are two frozen blue tailed skinks. (Those are lizard looking things if ya didn't know) Ugh. Why is he keeping the rodent? Why has it stayed in there for the past year? He found it in "perfect condition" dead on the side of the rode and immediately wrapped it in plastic bags and froze it - hoping to get it stuffed for his birthday or Christmas. He has been very disappointed with his gifts lately, but can you blame us? Who wants to carry this into some guy that stuffs animals for a living? I know I don't!

Frozen animals aside, I am very thankful that we aren't looking at an expensive repair bill or even more pricey appliance bill. Someday it would be nice to have a brand new refrigerator but we don't need one right now. I am kinda disappointed at the amount of storage room I am losing since this one is a bit smaller - but maybe it will force me to cook only what is needed and not buy useless food items.