How daily decisions impact our wallets more than I thought...

Jonathan and I had our 1st Dave Ramsey FPU class this past sunday. If you don't know much about Dave Ramsey he is an awesome speaker and gives out common sense advice about working a budget and saving money for your future. Which I think we all could take his advice looking at our current economy and financial state!

Ok, back to our class. There was one chart that really stuck out to me. How our "Daily decisions can make a Huge impact!" Here are few examples.

Say you smoke a pack a day, or have some other habit like candy break, coke break, ice cream break, etc. And it cost you $3 a day...that is $90 a month/$1,080 a year. Wow! Think about what you could do with that money if you just put that is savings everyday!!!

Ok I know what you are thinking. I thought the same thing...I don't really have a habit of spending $3 a day on cigs or snacks. But do you enjoy those cool $5 cups of gourmet coffee? Lets use that in the same example: $5 a day for your fancy coffee...that is $150 a month/$1,800 a year. Even bigger WOW!!!

Now this is the example that really hit home with me and my husband. If your like us you have been known to eat out for lunch. We have cut back this year, but we have done this. An avg. lunch runs you $8 and the avg. work week is 5 days that is $40 a week....$160 a month/$1,920 a year. Yikes!

So here is my question. Lets take the lunch example and say you take your lunch everyday for 60 years. Why 60 years because that is the example Dave uses in his chart, you save from age 16-76. Guess how much you could save.....
$115,200 I think I could handle that to take a nice little vacation!
And here is Dave's example: Take that $160 a month and invest it at 12% from age 16-76. Guess what that will get you.....
$20,663,319 Forget the vacation, I am going to buy a few vacation homes!

Take a few mins and take this in. I vote we all pack our lunch, find a bench or nice spot to meet with friends and enjoy our savings and dream together where we are going to buy our future vacation homes!

For more wonderful info on Dave Ramsey as well as where you can find a class in your neighborhood go to http://www.daveramsey.com/.