Meet the Bryant Family
To speak to training coordinator Robin Dunn Bryant, you would never guess the crises that this sunny spirited woman has faced in the past few years. In 2006, right before a move from Washington, D.C., Robin was diagnosed with breast cancer; her husband, Lateef, was still looking for work, and they had a teenage daughter, Nailah, in school.
Robin opted to maintain her former employer’s COBRA health insurance coverage, the premium of which consumed 40 percent of her paycheck. Then her employer bounced several paychecks, and “Our account was a shambles,” she explains. Physically healthy now, Robin and Lateef want to see their family get financially healthy, paying off old debts, building savings, improving their credit scores and creating a college fund for Nailah.
Blog
It's all connected...everything
07/13/2010 11:00 pm
Whew...I am relieved we made it through the first round of eliminations. I'm not going to lie, I was scared we weren't going to make it through. Now its time to get back to business. I haven't blogged in a while but I have had a lot on my mind before the elimination and now that we are moving on I have a lot of unexplored feelings and ideas. I will try to expound on some of these feelings in this blog.
I am a firm believer in the connectedness of the mind, body and spirit...and now add personal finances to that mix. I have heard before from some financial guru that the way you treat your money says a lot about the way you treat yourself. If you abuse your money, you a likely to be destructive to yourself in some way as well. Before entering this competition I was blind to this notion. I treated money as a means with no end. I treated it as if it would never run out despite living check to check. I was abusive with my hard earned money and I have paid some dire consequences as a result. My credit suffered, I saved nothing and spent everything. I had no plan for my money despite having good intentions for it.
I am beginning to see how the way you treat your money says a lot about the way you treat yourself. Although I signed up for it, this We Live Fit Challenge has put me and my family under a microscope I was not fully ready to be under. My credit scores are out there for the world to see. My lack of savings is now public knowledge and my astronomical amount of debt is in plain sight.
The one thing I have come to learn is that nothing about life exists in a vacuum. Since being selected for this challenge, I have taken up several initiatives all designed to bring balance to mind, body, spirit and now personal finances. The goal for me is to achieve a peace of mind I have never known.
On Father's Day weekend, I went down to Wekiwa State Park to participate in a 6 hour adventure race. While challenging, grueling and demanding, I found a certain bit of resolve that I was able to draw from being in the We Live Fit Challenge. The adventure race, much like this challenge required navigation skills, planning, stamina and most important, the ability to meet adversity with steely resolve. What I learned about myself after the delirium subsided was that I needed to treat my finances more like how I treat my body, how I treat my mind and spirit.
I played fast and loose with my mind, body and spirit in my 20's and I found my 30's to be an uphill battle. My struggles with money have been no different. I had an epiphany out in that park in the 90 degree heat that forever changed how I view money and even more so how I viewed myself. I realized just how connected everything in life is and just how disconnected everything can be if it left untended to.
Whew!
06/29/2010 12:47 pm
Okay, so we made it through the first elimination. Talk about nerve wracking. We got to the bank at 10:30 and sat in a room with the other families for a good while waiting for the press conference to start. I was joking with the Mallory family that perhaps they would bring jousting sticks in and have us fight to the death, but I was really nervous. We'd done pretty well with the aspects that we could control, but I didn't know how well we'd done overall with the community vote. Y'all helped pull us through and I want to thank you for that. I'm sad to see the three eliminated families go: the Kirkseys, Exantus, and Fleischers. They are nice folks. The good thing is that there were new prizes announced today: money for 2nd and 3rd place overall and for the top "at home" family.
On another note: I didn't realize it had been *so* long since we've blogged. I was really consumed (read: obsessed) with the voting and had little energy for writing. It's time to get back on the grind, starting with a new Financial Friday entry this week. Let's make it a two-fer and we'll answer two of the questions we've gotten from the community.
Thank you so much for your help and support. On to the next thing.
Financial Friday: Getting Started
06/11/2010 12:07 am
Welcome to our first installment of Financial Friday. Every week we will wrack our brains to answer financial questions posted by members of the community. If you'd like to ask a question, please post it in the discussion board: http://www.welivefitchallenge.com/discuss/what_financial_questions_do_you_want_answered. We will pick questions at random each week and post our responses on Fridays.
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How do you even get started with trying to get ahead? If your always in the negative?
Signed,
Ksimpson
Dear Ksimpson,
Boy are you asking the right folks this question. When we first moved down to Tallahassee we were banking with a credit union in Maryland (not nearly as awesome as Florida Commerce). At some point during our move they sent us a letter that stated they had placed overdraft protection on our account and that we had X number of days to contact them to turn it off. Well, of course we never did because we were in the middle of a move and our mail was delayed. Fast forward a couple of months and the company that I was working for bounced 5 payroll checks in almost as many weeks and those of us *points to self* who had auto payments coming out of their account were knocked over like a stack of dominoes. For about two years we were stuck in a cycle of the "courtesy pays" eating about $400 a month. But anyway...I do tend to go on.
How do you get started? Look very closely at your bank accounts and how you are spending your money. There is a good tracking tool on this site that can help you. Go to this address to see the Fritter Finder: http://balancepro.net/pdf/fritter.pdf. You use this everyday for a week for cash and debit purchases to see where it is you're spending your money. Now just because you're watching what you spend all of the sudden, don't become the most frugal minded person on the planet. Be yourself and spend as you normally do or you won't really see the patterns correctly.
Another way to see how you're spending money is to look back at a couple of months worth of bank statements to see what you've spent money on. When we did this we found a bunch of interesting things: that we spend way too much eating out and that we all seem to like to stop at the gas station for snacks.
After you've got that information look through it and see if there are places where you could cut back. Do you have a gas station snack habit? Do you drink venti drinks daily from Starbucks? You might see some things right way that you could cut back on. Notice I'm saying cut back and not cut out...I am one who believes that a moderate approach will probably stick better. Remember, though, I'm not financial expert. I just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express...
After you've looked at where you might be frittering away money, take a good look at your monthly bills. Is there something you are paying for you can cut down or turn off completely? Do you have cable/satellite TV with all of the premium channels? Do you watch all of them? If you get HBO because you love True Blood then consider only paying for HBO during the True Blood season. Is your City of Tallahassee bill higher than you think it should be? (They will do a free energy audit for you, by the way, even if you are a renter.) Do you have a swanky cell phone with a huge data package? If your bills are higher than you want them to be, make sure you're not paying for services that you don't use. If you have a cell phone, check your average usage each month to see if you can get into a cheaper package.
After you've done that do one last thing: take a look at when all of your bills are due. I know that before one of my girlfriends gave me some advice about it I paid the majority of my bills (including rent) at the first of the month. Which meant that I was running on empty between the first check and the second. She told me to look at what I paid out and try to split the bills evenly in some way. (I ended up putting half of the rent into savings with one check and then paying the other half - and sending the check - with the second check.) She also said to make sure that I didn't have several big bills coming out of one check. So you probably wouldn't want rent and the City of Tallahassee to come out of one check. Look at your bills and see if there is a way you can split them between your paychecks. You can always pay a bill early, but if you find that splitting when you pay them won't work with your current due dates, consider calling around to see if people will adjust them for you. Most places will. Just be careful of prorated bills, especially for cell phones.
I hope that is enough to get you started Ksimpson. Check back each Friday as we will be giving out more advice. And, please, tell all of your friends to register and vote for us next week. We'd like to stick around to be able to share this type of information with everyone.
Check In: May Self-Imposed Challenge Results
06/09/2010 04:20 pm
So last month we set out to complete the tasks given to us by Florida Commerce, as well as to complete a task that we laid out for ourselves: spending no more than $60 on fast food during the month of May.
Let me just recap what we were working with for you:
- January we spent $295.83 eating out
- February was a good month, we only spent $77.81
- March was ridiculous! We spent a whopping $629.24
- April was better than March, but not much. Grand total: $434.33
If you’re good at reading between the lines you’ll know that we probably didn’t make our goal of spending no more than $60 on fast food…and you’d be right. Last month we spent $201.98, but I’m considering it a win in the “battle” column even if we’re still losing the war. We still are spending far more than we should eating out. Especially since both of us are trying to take care of ourselves physically as well as financially. But last month we managed to do two things: 1) drastically cut our eating out expenses and 2) start really focusing on when and why we spend our money as well as how. We both do a lot of “comfort spending”. If we are stressed, tired, bored or lonely we tend to self-medicate those feelings…and a lot of that is with food. Long day at work? Some French Fries are good for what ails you. Kitchen a mess and you’re too tired to clean it? Hungry Howie’s pizza is only $6 if you get the special…
I won’t try to fool you or myself about the stress we’ve been under in the past few years. I got my diagnosis two days before we quit our jobs to move down here and we landed in Tallahassee with one job between us and cancer hanging over our heads. We fought our way through the cancer and both starting working extremely stressful jobs. Though we’ve been here for almost four years, in a lot of ways we are still strangers to Tallahassee. There’s something to drive you to comfort spending/eating, don’t you think?
Now comes the hard part. I wholeheartedly believe that if you can identify a problem that you’re also responsible for trying to solve it. “I’m Robin and I compulsively spend money when I’m feeling out of sorts in a reckless attempt to either feel better or not feel what I’m feeling.”
This is obviously one of the biggest things our family needs to focus on. Being in the challenge is forcing me to interact with our finances in an entirely different way. Before I was just glad if we had enough money to get from one paycheck to the next with relying on the courtesy pays, now I want to know what we spent and why. I’d like to come out of each month without thinking we just frittered away hundreds of dollars. Come back in a couple of days folks. I had some ideas about June’s self-imposed challenge already, but a few things need to be added before I post it here.
A small measure of success
06/09/2010 12:01 pm
So even though we were in the bottom of the leader board *again* for the challenge there is some good news to share. A few weeks ago we contacted six of our creditors to make them offers on the bills we owed them. Initially I called them and got correct balances and mailing addresses and was feeling on top of the world. I decided to Google for a letter template to send with the payments when I came across several sites that urged me to get confirmation in writing that once we paid the bills that they would also remove the information from our credit reports.
Of course, in my haste - we had the money to pay them off, after all - I neglected that very important step. I panicked for a little while. What's the use of paying the damned things off if they are just going to hang around on your report? I took a little break from reading the sites and when I came back I decided to send a letter to each of the people I had already contacted via phone to request a letter that stated that after we made the payment - yep, the letter was being sent without the payment attached - they would remove the information from our credit report.
We spent a little extra and sent the letters out certified/return receipt requested. (By the way, folks, if you are going to do this with several letters either get the return receipt and certified slips early so you can fill them out or bring someone with you. It took Nailah and I about 15 minutes to fill out everything.)
The return receipts came back quickly, but we still hadn't gotten any letters until this weekend. Lateef and I each got one and just like that three negative entries on our credit reports are gone! I couldn't be happier. And along the way I got read some great advice about making settlement offers (for pennies on the dollar) that I'm going to try out with the next batch. We've still got three people outstanding and about seven more things to pay (not including student loans which is an entirely different story.) I think things are definitely looking up.
05/24/2010 01:47 am
This was the most enjoyable task for me this month. We'd already had the alerts set up on our account – CHECK. All we had to do was set up the online bill payments.
Since I started my new job we've changed the way that we pay our bills. Instead of getting paid every other week like Lateef, I get paid once a month. So we use my paycheck for a lot of our “living” bills: rent, utilities, cell phones, cable, and savings. That leaves Lateef's checks for gas, groceries, household expenses and the like. It has been amazing. Because before we were always trying to time our bill payments with our paychecks (we used to work at the same place) and sometimes we were late. Now, no matter when the bill is due during the month, it gets paid when I do on the last working day of the month.
Now, I'm not sure if you've ever robbed Peter to pay Paul, but I sure have. And it's incredibly stressful to have the discussion about which bill you can afford not to pay and “how long before they turn off the lights?” It's just no way to live. I'm sure we could've figured out a better system eventually. (We were already there by using our savings account as a place to store half of the money for the larger bills we paid each month like rent and the City of Tallahassee bill.) But once I moved to getting paid once a month, we were forced to re-evaluate things and I'm so glad for it.
The beauty of the online bill pay is that before I get a chance to splurge on something, all of the bills are paid. It's just been a huge relief for us.
Review Cable/Phone/Cell Phone Expenses
05/19/2010 08:41 pm
This one might be as hard as the eating out challenge. The house phone is no real issue at all, but the cable bill and cell phone...that's another story.
I have to be honest here: we love our televisions. We've got three of them, one in the living room and one in each of our bedrooms. We've got two DVRs, HBO and DirectTV. This is a big dang deal.
Towards the beginning of April I had to travel with my job. I went to Wekiwa Springs State Park to run a Ranger Academy and spent 9 days in a park with no television. I loved it. I always enjoy getting away from home and completely unplugging. I was so passionate in my description that I managed to convince Lateef that along with ditching HBO we should get rid of the TV in our bedroom. The awesome part is that we'll gain about 5 feet of floor space (we are selling the TV and the cabinet that holds it.) Our thought is to create a small reading/meditation space. Aah. Very nice.
The cell phones wouldn't have been a problem about a year ago. We would've looked at the bill and chopped it down to the bare minimum. Actually back then we all had pre-paid phones that we barely used. Then...Lateef and I each got a Blackberry. Now I'd been anti-smartphone for years. When we lived in DC I saw people all together consumed by their phones. They couldn't go more than five minutes without checking their email or looking at their schedule or doing some something that kept them from connecting with the people they were around. I thought they were pretentious. I thought they were unnecessary. And then I got one...
Finally I could check my personal email during the day without having to worry about our company's firewall. I could check my Facebook ALL THE TIME. And, if I saw something I wanted on Craigslist, I could respond to the ad quickly enough to have a chance at getting it. And, an amazing thing happened, all of the sudden I could check our family calendar in the same minute that I checked my work appointments.
Obviously, I'm not giving up my phone. So we cut our house phone down to the bare minimum. No call waiting, no voicemail. We cut the bill by about $50. I think that's pretty good. Between the cable bill and the house phone we're going to save about $80 a month. Hopefully we'll make enough money when we sell the TV and the cabinet that we can get some nice meditation cushions.
Fear and Trepidation
05/18/2010 07:49 pm
See the title?
Well, I have both.
When my wife asked me if I wanted to do this challenge, I'll admit I said yes with a hint of hesitancy. I wasn't sure just how much information I wanted out there in the streets about me and at the time I certainly wasn't ready to have every financial decision scrutinized and picked through with a fine-toothed comb. I could barely stand a 5 minute conversation about laying out the bills. It made me tense...so tense that I would choke while eating. It was important for me to be able to keep something to myself. I wanted to keep this from the world.
After weeks of earning my "Bravery Badge" it dawned on me that the same fear that was keeping me from jumping head first into this challenge was the same fear that decimated my bank accounts and plundered my credit scores. I was content to not look at the big pink elephant for fear that I would eventually have to deal with it. I cringed during every conversation about "The Williams"1 because for starters, it was depressing to see all my hard-earned money go away and secondly, it seemed as if those conversations were hours long when they were only a few minutes. To be short, I was (and still am) financially crippled.
So now with this challenge kicking off and getting into high gear, I am forced to confront all of my financial demons and create better tools to slay the dragon standing in front of my proverbial pot of gold. At this point, however, on this day and time I am suffering from what a wise man once coined "Analysis Paralysis". Simply put, I feel like I should be doing more and strategerizing (is that a word? Spell Check says it isn't) less.
I guess this blog entry counts for me doing more.
1 "The Williams" aka the bills. Originally referenced in the song of the same name found on the Okayplayer True Notes CD circa 2004.
BALANCE Financial Counselor
05/17/2010 09:22 am
Tonight we met with the financial adviser from Balance. He talked to us about our budget and a little bit about our credit scores. All in all it was a good session. There was one thing that stuck out to me, though. He asked us what brought us to calling him. We gave him the standard fare answer: we want to increase our credit scores and savings and decrease our debt. No, that wasn't exactly what he was looking for. He wanted to know how we got ourselves into the situation we are in to begin with.
I don't know why it sticks in my throat so much, but I hate having to go through the whole breast cancer story all of the time. I'm moving away from not wanting to tell anyone – for awhile that was one way that I could feel normal – to wanting to control who I tell and when. It is, after all, my story. Some days I'm more equipped to dredge it all up than others.
I don't think today was one of those days. I gave him the 10,000 foot view: we moved from Maryland right after I was diagnosed, I was working part-time and Lateef was looking for a job, I paid out almost half of my income to COBRA coverage, and our lives fell apart. There's so much more behind that quick retelling, though, of course. I was just happy that he didn't continue to push so we could move on.
We'll have to exercise a little patience to get all of the information. He took a whole bunch of notes and will be working up a prospective budget for us. Since the office is out in San Francisco, it'll take a bit to get to us (he's going to snail mail it to us.) The thing that struck both of us was that he said he found about $900 a month... I can hardly believe that. I'm hoping he's right, though, and that it just wasn't that we forgot to give him something that's we're paying for or saving. It would be huge for us.
If you haven't worked up a monthly budget, now's a good time. If you're local, of course, I'd suggest you join Florida Commerce because the services that Balance offers are free to members. If you're out of town it might be worth asking at your bank what kinds of financial planning/management assistance they offer. If you want to get started yourself, you could map out your expenses in an Excel spreadsheet to get started. (If you go to the Microsoft site and search for templates, you'll find some pretty good sheets that are already set up.)
Review Insurance Costs
05/17/2010 09:21 am
This is one of the easiest tasks we've got this month. Lateef and I are are lucky that we're both able to get health insurance through work. Traditionally, however, we haven't all had the same coverage. Before Lateef and I got married, I carried Nailah on my policy. When we moved down here, he started carrying her on his because I had the ridiculously expensive COBRA coverage. We'd never really thought to change it until I started working for the state. Unfortunately I got my new job in January, so we missed the open enrollment period for them. But as soon as it's that time again, they are going to switch over to be on with me. That's going to save us a good bunch of money.
We're not going to touch our auto insurance right now. Geico is actually our best bet. But we've got a teenager that will be driving soon, so you bet your life we're going to spend some time on INSWEB.com soon.
What We're Up To This Month
05/17/2010 08:25 am
Besides our self-imposed hiatus from fast food this month, there are other tasks that have been assigned to the We Live Fit Families. Since we started at the end of April we've had about XX tasks that we were to complete before our second meeting with our coach. I figure that if you're reading this you're doing so because you're more than curious about what the Bryants are doing, maybe you're looking for some insights for your own life. I'm all about sharing the wealth, I'll make sure to always let you know what the tasks we're taking on.
Here's what's on the books for May:
Task 1: Spend no more than $60 on fast food during the month of May
Task 2: Make appointment with Balance Financial Counselor
Task 3: Review insurance costs
Task 4: Review Cable/Phone/Cell Phone Expenses
Task 5: Review other expenses to determine where to cut back to meet goals
Task 6: Set up online bill payments
Task 7: Set up alerts to notify us of certain events on our account
Task 8: Take four online courses
Task 9: Have our daughter take an online course aimed at teenagers
Task 10: Have our daughter set financial goals as well
Check back often to see how we're handling this.
Photos
Videos
Scorecard
| Current Savings* | Debt Level* | FICO Score |
|---|---|---|
| $10.33 | $160,336.00 | 498 |
Figures as of April 2010
