I really am my son's mother!

Well let's see. Today's obsession for my son Benjamin, age 6, is Neopets. "Mom, the only thing I want to do is play Neopets.com on the computer." Three days ago it was Nick.com. He gets enough computer game time, I'd hate to see what he would try to do with a game system!

My obsession for the week, or at least the last two days, has been finances. Last week it was blogging. The month before it was Scrapshare border swaps. (I mail in 5 identical borders and I get an assortment back.) But today, it is Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. We got in debt buying this house, and I don't mean mortgage debt. I mean credit-card-because-we-didn't-have-funds-for-closing-costs kind of debt. I blame it on being uninformed, misinformed, poor money managers, moving to a town where we had to rush into buying because there are no family friendly rentals available. At least there weren't at the time we were looking. Add on the car payments (which thankfully are all gone now) for cars we had to go in debt to get because of accidents/broken down cars/needing a second car to take son to school and not have to make the one hour round trip to take Kyle to work and then pick him up.

Then, through Scrapshare of course, I found Dave Ramsey. He has a nationally syndicated radio program that I listen to online. (Thank goodness for DSL!) I already ordered his book off of amazon. And I spoke with a financial advisor that he recommends to help us revamp our investments and savings.

We have been wanting to get out of debt, especially since I got all our financial info on Quicken and I started including Kyle in bill paying and financial decision making. He always left it to me. Scary. We were motivated to pay it off, but didn't have the knowhow to really pull it off. Now I feel empowered. It feels nice to "know" about debt now and investing and savings and life insurance and mortgages and... I think I listened to 5 hours of his program archives yesterday and 3 hours today.

I wonder when my obsessions will channel elsewhere. I hope I keep the finances as a priority, though. It would sure feel good!