I mentioned in my post last week that we were interviewed for a Marketplace show on NPR about personal finance issues. I’ve never been in a radio station and I try to avoid microphones for a lot of reasons, so this was all new and lots of fun for me. Our segment is only about 6 minutes or so of the hour long show, so I was surprised how much advice we got in that short window of time. We met in San Antonio and did the recording together so we could try to avoid talking over each other or interrupting (it’s a crazy pet peeve of mine) and then had a bit of lunch outside the building. Altogether a great experience!
We got some really great advice from the financial planner that was guest hosting. I asked him what he thought about our payoff strategy, and he said we really needed to focus on working together to agree on a plan that makes us both happy. He said that research shows that happily married couples in strong relationships end up accumulating the most wealth over time. While we’re not all that interested in gaining wealth (just getting out of debt) I thought the advice was encouraging. It suggests that if we can be happy together we’ll be financially stable too. That’s not something I’ve heard before. Usually we think about it the other way- that if we are financially stable or wealthy, we’ll be happy together. Hmmmm.
Even though we’re happy together, we have some issues we could stand to work on. It’s only our first three years and we have a lot to learn- but at least it’s not as bad as the first year! Yikes! 🙂 it encourages me to think that working on the issues we have might help us with our finances.
If you want to listen, our segment starts at 13:38:
http://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-money/marketplace-money-friday-august-2-2013
What advice did you like?
you have to be happy, otherwise, what is it all for? So just be happy.
That’s cool about the radio show! Our first year was rough too. It gets better every time!
Quick question, not sure if you’ve addressed it. Are you tackling each loan by interest rate, balance, or spreading out the payments evenly?
at this point we are attacking by lowest balance. our bigger loans, with similar balances, have much different interest rates, so when we get to those, we’ll go with the higher rates first.