Single Step Personal Finance Challenge

The Challenge

Earlier this week Mrs. Micah put a challenge out to all the personal finance bloggers. She called it the “Single Step Personal Finance Challenge”. Basically, the challenge is this:

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… Find one step you can take to make your financial system better or more organized.

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

At our household

In thinking about our finances at the Money Matters household, we’ve made some great strides in the past couple of years.  All of those strides involved lots of smaller “single steps”.  We paid off our last non-mortgage debt (student loan), we bought a new home with a large down payment and we saved a nice emergency fund.

Only earlier this year did we begin more seriously exploring our finances and thinking of ways we could improve them after hearing about Dave Ramsey from a friend at church.   Up until then we’d been relatively successful because we both enjoyed being debt free, and neither one of us was a big spender.  But we realized that we WERE wasting a lot of money.  We could have been saving a lot more for retirement, vacations, and other things that we needed.

We are now going through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, and that was a huge single step for us on getting on the road to financial independence. If you haven’t take that step already, I would highly recommend it. Since taking the class we’ve stored away our emergency fund, and saved almost 6 months of expenses.  We’re firmly on board with the idea that you should pay cash for everything you buy.

Our Single Step

Now that we’re on our way to becoming financially independent, we have lots of smaller steps to take that we’ve just been procrastinating.  Probably the biggest one that I have been putting off is starting a retirement account.

For the longest time I’ve been saving money in our 401k, and i feel good about that.  The problem is that I’m not 100% confident in the investment choices that our 401k plan has, there is no company match and I’d rather start my own Roth IRA where I can sock money away after taxes.

I know I want to take this step, and believe it to be a good idea, but I keep putting it off because I don’t feel like I have the time, energy or the knowledge to do that right now.

So my single step is to take that first step towards opening the account, by doing some research on Roth IRAs this month. If you know of any good resources to point me to, please leave me a comment!

What’s your single step on the road to financial independence?

Here are some links to other bloggers and their “Single Step”:

1. Reasons to Write a Last Will and Testament at The Wisdom Journal
2. Mrs. Micah’s Single Step Personal Finance Challenge at The Dangling Conversation
3. Single Step Personal Finance Challenge – Pay Off Remaining Medical Debt at My Two Dollars
4. Personal finance challenge at We Like Money
5. My single step personal finance challenge at Gather Little By Little
6. Organize Your Finances: Take Just One Step at Prime Time Money
7. House insurance challenge at Plonkee Money
8. First Step Personal Finance Challenge: Budget My Last Paychecks at Green Panda Treehouse
9. Single Step Personal Finance Challenge at Moolanomy.com
10. Single Step Personal Finance Challenge at MyTwoDollars

If you’ve got a “single step” story and you’ve blogged about it – let me know!  I’ll post a link at the end of this list!

Tagged as: Commentary, meme, personal finance

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