Questions

Let me start off by saying thank you for the encouraging comments a few of you have left. It's good to hear from people who have been successful at this.

Last night I finally took a crack at putting together a budget using the budgeting application at the TMMO site. That was pretty depressing. We only have about $340 left after all our expenses but that doesn't include any savings for clothing, entertainment, gifts, etc... so I think that number will be a little lower after accounting for those things.

This has raised some questions for me. Sadly, we have two leased cars with payments of $245 and $291/month. If we could get out of those we'd obviously be much better off. The problem is there is little to no equity between the payoff amount and what the cars are worth. We also have nothing saved up to buy a new car so even if we sold one or both we'd still have to get a loan to pay for the "new" car(s). We're going to out this weekend and see if we can find a decent "cheap" car and see exactly what we can get for one of the leases. Other than that I'm not sure what to do about this problem...

We also have around $7200 in mutual funds left over from my college savings that my parents started for me when I was young. We've always treated this money as if it didn't exist and relied on it as an emergency fund if we ever need it. Now I'm wondering if we should take some or all of it out to either pay down some of the debt or help with the car situation. I've been searching around the Dave Ramsey MyTMMO site but haven't found any specific answers to this question.

Finally, my wife has a variable universal life insurance policy that her parents started for her when she was young. It costs us $84/year to keep it going. I know Dave says these are absolutely useless investment tools but the payout on it is only about $740 and since it's so cheap I'm wondering if it's worth it to cash it out. I don't know if there are penalties or tax implications for doing this.

ugg...