Edwards Family Empowerment

Congratulations on completing your debt snowball! Now it's time to move to Baby Step 3. Baby Step 3  is where you put 3-6 months of expenses into savings or a money market account as a fully funded emergency fund. Rachel Cruze, Dave Ramsey’s daughter, says that a good rule of thumb is: “ The more stable your income and household are, the less you need in your emergency fund.” The three-month guideline is mostly for those in salaried positions who have a secure or steady income. So, if you are in a two-income home and or have been at your job for more than three years, then a three-month emergency fund is ideal for you.   If your income is not stable, i.e. if you have an one income home, you’re self-employed, you earn straight commission, if you have an irregular income, or you fear that there is a possibility you could lose your job in the future, you should consider trying to save six months’ worth of expenses. If someone in your home has a chronic medical condition that re...

Lela Houston This subject is very close and dear to me because this is the person who raised me and my brother like she was our mom. After my mom and dad got A divorce, I was around 5 years old, and to be honest it was not a good place for any child to be. Needless to say, things were tough for us.  We stayed with our mom from time to time, but she was never really stable.  We often never stayed in any place longer than a few months. My sister, Sand, helped to watch over us along with her son while we stayed in Matthew Lane.  For the most part, those were good days, even though we got by on the bare minimum, but I was a child who kept company with myself. My imagination just blossomed in those harvested fields that surrounded our home. I don’t know why exactly, but my dad took us to A’ Lela’s house.  We would go there often to visit, but never stayed more than a few hours at a time, then one day we packed our clothes and was told that we would be staying with A’ Le...

 4. Your spouse isn’t on board 5. You aren’t consistent 6. You aren’t tracking your progress Your spouse is not onboard. Finances are one of the biggest causes of divorce or even simply arguments in a relationship. Doing the debt snowball is a lifestyle change, a very big one. Your spouse might not be a huge, Dave Ramsey fan. The debt snowball may not seem like the perfect idea to solve your debt issues to them. This was the case with me. Renardo, is not a Dave Ramsey fan. Sometimes it takes patience and a lot of frank discussions in order to get your spouse onboard. One thing that worked for me in swaying him is walking him slowly through the process. I did the legwork in getting all of our bills, student loans, car notes, mortgages, and credit cards with their respective annual percentage rates (aprs), monthly payments, and remaining balances using the Dave Ramsey snapshot tool or the Debt Snowball Calculator. I approached him with this and after a few attempts was able to sway h...

 You’re not budgeting You’re not 100% focused on your lowest balance Your income and expenses are remaining the same Your spouse isn’t on board You aren’t consistent You aren’t tracking your progress This is the step that I struggle with. The Debt Snowball. It would be easier to pretend like I didn’t have issues with this, but I am not. Most wounds don’t heal unless exposed. After Renardo and I remarried, we began budgeting, saving, and hustling for our dream…owning a home. We managed to obtain our dream only to slide back into old habits. After obtaining our home, we generated more debt. We recently bought a new house, a new car, among other things. We were sensible in our purchases, and can afford everything we bought, but we did not go in the direction that was most beneficial to us. Debt reduction. A lot of the pointers that Dave Ramsey espouses, we did not follow. So, I know the struggle is real. Step 2 is the step that I struggle with. One of my goals is to one day overcome o...

 So, this is the part of the Dave Ramsey plan where people fall out. They give up. They claim they can’t go on. The debt snow-ball. I am saying this because it is true for me. Dave Ramsey says that I am not alone. Many others struggle with this step. I have been on this step for quite awhile now. I haven’t given up, and I haven’t fallen out, but I seriously understand. My goal is to complete this step and move to step 3. Why is this part so hard? It requires a lot of self-awareness and self-sacrifice. Dave Ramsey says, “Personal Finance is 80 percent behavior and 20 percent head knowledge.” So, what is this monster that I am asking you to tame? What does it require of you? It’s simple to explain but requires a lot of change in spending habits to put into effect. This is doable though, with a lot of determination and elbow grease, you can live the life of your dreams later, by making changes to your bill paying now. First, you make sure that you have your budget and your emergency f...

   It’s no secret, I am a big Dave Ramsey fan. I’ve decided to talk about his game plan to become debt free.  Dave has seven steps to financial freedom. It’s a journey that I am currently on that I believe will benefit my family and I encourage you to look into it for yours. Dave calls the steps baby steps toward financial freedom. Before a baby learns to walk fully, there are small tentative steps they take before they begin walking. These are the steps you take before gaining financial freedom. THE 7 BABY STEPS Step 1: Save $1,000 for your starter emergency fund. Step 2: Pay off all debt (except for the house) using the debt snowball. Step 3: Save 3-6 months of expenses in a fully funded emergency fund. Step 4: Invest 15% of your household income in retirement. Step 5: Save for your children’s college fund. Step 6: Pay off your home early. Step 7: Build wealth and give. In the upcoming months I will talk about each step. This month, I will talk about the importance of h...

 I have decided to create a vision board for our family. I encourage you to create one for your family or yourself as well. Everyone has dreams or an idea of what they want their future to look like. A vision board is supposed to be a way of capturing your dreams, goals, or the desires of your heart into a snapshot and placing them on a board.   A vision board can be made on a poster board, a cork board, or a computer screen are some suggestions. Pictures from magazines of the home the dream home that you want to live in. Stock images from the internet. Printed words of the things you want to get better at…growing closer to God, getting a better job, getting a Play Station 5, again it’s your vision board, you can put whatever you want on it.  It can be for the year, or your lifetime goals. It’s your board so you get to choose. Prayer and visualizing what you want, along with a little elbow grease, are how you achieve your dreams. The good thing about creating one eac...

 Thomas Edwards – The Uncle I Knew Thomas Edwards was born to Napoleon and Mattie Edwards in 1914. He was the youngest of thirteen children. The time Thomas grew up in was nothing like the 60’s or even now. He grew up during the height of the Ku Klux Klan, when lynching was a common thing. It is hard to imagine being a poor black boy in a family of sharecroppers in Perry County, Alabama. This was the world of Thomas Edwards, a poor, smart young man with a great sense of humor in which one would need to endure the toil and outright prejudice of that day. Those early years taught Thomas the importance of family because he understood that it was family that got him through those rough days of Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Thomas indeed survived those trials but he went one better coming out of it he was instill with a strong sense of independence that was based on a strong family unit and that idea he had so long ago is what paved a way that we now are trying to keep open today....

 When we were in college, we applied for credit cards and thought we hit the jackpot when we got approved. They started off as small approval amounts, $300 here or $500 there. We would make small purchases here and there, pay our minimum payment on our bill on time, and slowly the amount we owed grew. What eventually happened after making so many on time credit card payments, the credit card companies would increase our credit limit and the cycle would start again. We would celebrate with spending more. We were facing one of the biggest issues that most Americans face and that is credit card debt. As of mid-2019, Americans have 1.08 trillion in credit card debt. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover are the most popular cards to have. We used to be proud of the credit cards we had. Now the goal is to pay off our credit cards and to have a healthy savings account.  I’ve talked about the snow ball-effect, which Ramsey is known for. You know, arranging your credit card...

 I used to think that if I made a little more money, it would solve all of my financial problems. It turned out not to be true though. When I was in the military, the first place where I was told to report to work was in Fort Lewis, Washington. My basic pay was about a $1,000 a month and my apartment cost about $700. Being in the military, I received money to cover the cost of housing and also money for me and my family to eat. This was before John McCain passed a law to increase the amount of money that military families made. This law was passed because Soldiers were paid so little they were eligible for assistance programs like food stamps and WIC. I’m not going to lie, all three of my children were on the WIC program. We lived in a small house. We could watch the front living room tv from the bedroom, but we made ends meet. The one thing we did (that I regret) was that as I got promoted in rank, and began earning more money, we began spending more money. Our tastes grew to suit...

Born to Armster (Ump) and Alice Edwards, Renardo, graduated from Parker High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1994. I am Natricia, and I am the daughter of Charles and Natricia Rogers. I graduated from Alba High School, located in Bayou la Batre, Alabama, with an advanced diploma with honors in 1994.    Renardo and I met and fell in love in college at Alabama State University. We moved to Birmingham in 1995, where we lived with his brother, Nathaniel Edwards for a few months. We are eternally grateful for Nathan’s support during this time. He allowed us to launch our lives in a new city and showed us the value of family helping family out. He helped Nard get a good job and we were able to move out on our own within three months. He took a chance on us and empowered us.    I enlisted in the military in August of 1997. The down side from this is that we were away from family and could only rely on ourselves. This forced us to adapt to a changing world and learn to do a...

  Dr. Lynn Richardson, a financial coach for the stars, suggests that you do several things to improve your finances.  Some of the suggestions are simple, for example, spending less than you make.  My late brother-in-law, Levorn Sanders, used to say, “You’ve got to watch your money, because it can’t watch itself.”  I would suggest that you make out a budget to help you with this. Make a list of every bill you have and allot money you pay to each bill.  When you have done this, take your net take home pay and see how much money you have left over.  Does this amount match up with what you have extra at the end of the month? If it doesn’t, you should consider trying to track your daily spending. Tracking my daily spending has always been hard for me. I forget to log in an amount, or I draw money out and forget where I spent it.  To fix this I tried a free app called Mint. This app was supposed to track my every withdrawal from my accounts and also give me...

 Both in the past and the present, harmonious voices sang lyrics of pain, fear, and hope to call out injustices and discrimination. During the Civil Rights Movement, tears and blood were shed at the hands of oppressors who denied the fact that Black people deserved to have the same rights as them. To not only sit at the front of the bus comfortably, be taught in the best schools, vote proudly, live freely in the skin they’re in, be treated as a human being, but to also love wholeheartedly without fear or judgment.    Indiana and Napoleon Edwards were an impoverished black couple from the early 1900s. They faced many difficulties because of the color of their skin. They were like night and day not only in temperament but in skin color as well. Indiana was a dark-skinned woman and Napoleon was the son of a white man and a black woman, a mulatto. Indiana was originally from Autauga County, Alabama, while Napoleon was originally from Perry County, Alabama. They met. They fell...

 Investing in the black community is both novel and perilous; despite that, we must invest in ourselves, because the truth is no one else will. This organization is designed to channel resources to much needed causes of wealth creation in our community. Some of my favorite places are Normandale Mall in Montgomery, Alabama, and downtown Selma, along with Bush Blvd in Ensley, Alabama. These to me are beautiful places with character and history. Due to a lack of capital, they are left to be abandoned and to decay. This organization will not only help to strengthen our Family but also rebuild communities.  By: Renardo Edwards