UPDATE - I'm Reviewing My Free Credit Report

UPDATE - This is for Todd. Credit report looks good. Credit freeze is on! It was easy to do online at:

Experian
TransUnion
Equifax

Cost for all 3 was $0 (FREE) for Indiana residents.

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This morning I went to annualcreditreport.com and printed my credit report from the three credit bureaus for free.

Annualcreditreport.com is the official site to get your free credit report without any strings attached that could cost you money.

There are other sites with hypnotically catching jingles (you just can't get it out of your head) that claim to be free but that come with strings attached. The most common is automatic enrollment in a "free" trial membership to a credit monitoring service. If you don't cancel your membership within the 7 day trial you get billed $14.95/mo. until you cancel.

I'm going to review my reports to make sure that there isn't anything on them that I'm not aware of. If there is, I'll investigate because it might be a sign that someone is using my identity to request credit.

After I'm sure that my credit report is in good order, I'm going to freeze my credit so that no one can open a credit account using my identity.

Snowballs...

We got our first snow of the year last week. Man...it's way too early for snow. We're in for a long winter. I really hate winter. Anyhow, we decided to make the best of it and make snowmen. To make these snowmen we had to make giant snowballs. We started with a handfull of snow and rolled it around in the snow as it packed on and got bigger and bigger.

All of this snowball making reminded me of the Debt Snowball concept that Dave Ramsey talks about. Here's how the concept works:

1. Destroy/close credit cards - they can't be used
2. Squeeze a little bit of extra money from the budget every month
3. Make a list of all debts from smallest to largest on a piece of paper
4. Apply the extra money that was found to the smallest debt while paying the minimum monthly payment on all the other debts
5. When the smallest debt is paid off, combine everything that was being paid on that debt with the minimum payment amount on the next smallest debt while paying the minimum monthly payment on all other debts.
6. Repeat until all debt is paid off.

The snowball affect comes as each debt is paid off. As each debt is paid more money is available to attack the next debt. This is an effective and proven way to get out of debt. However, it takes time and requires intense focus from start to finish. It only works if no new debt is added which is why #1 and the budget in #2 is so important.

Excel Resource - Mr. Excel Podcast

Todd told me about this in a phone conversation and posted about it here.

Mr. Excel is an awesome resource if you use Excel regularly. He's got little hints and tricks that I never knew. A couple of examples that I looked at recently involved cleaning up charts with dates and using the consolidate tool to consolidate data from multiple worksheets into one.

This is really good stuff. I've subscribed to his video podcast in itunes. It's free. It's daily. It's about 2-4 minutes each. I'm loving it.

Thanks Mr. Excel!

More on Budgeting

My friend Todd had a good post on budgeting the other day. The things he mentions that he does are a lot similar to the things we do at GCC. We're currently in the process right now.

• We track weekend attendance and per capita giving levels and compare them year over year for trends. Then, we try to determine what we think these two components will do in the year to come.
• Per Capital Giving = Avg. Weekly Giving/Avg. Weekly Auditorium Attendance
• Per Capita Giving forecast X Avg. Weekend Attendance forecast X # of weeks in the upcoming year = Annual Revenue forecast
• How will revenue be distributed by month over the coming year. This is based on 5 or more years of historical giving data.
• We determine what staff costs will look like in the coming year. We start with current staff. Anticipate pay raises, increases in benefit costs like insurance. Can we hire new staff?
• How much is left to allocate to ministry? What are our ministry goals for the upcoming year?
• Set budget targets for departments based goals and what can be allocated after staff cost.
• Ask the departments to submit budgets based on the targets that were set. Targets include operating and capital expenses. I've got to brag on our staff. They are really good at this.
• Review, tweak, approve
• In the end, it all has to balance.

Like Todd, this is all done using multiple Excel spreadsheets prior to the final budget being entered into our Great Plains Accounting System.