With the new year and new goals around our home, we've been working on redoing our family budget. I want our kids to grow up learning to value experiences over things and we've been dejunking and redirecting our spending to reflect these goals. Then we found out a couple of weeks ago that Zions Bank is hosting a series of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University courses all around Utah and Idaho in the next few weeks.

For those that don't know it is a 9 week course that teaches everything from insurance, retirement and college planning, real estate and mortgages. I've heard great things about his financial plans and his program and started looking into it when I discovered that you don't sign up as individuals, you sign up as a household and EVERYONE in the household ages 19 and under gets a LIFETIME membership. Now our kids are still young and probably won't attend with us but really I got excited that they can repeat the course themselves if they ever want. So we signed up to take one of their classes that starts next week and at some point my kids will be required to sit through it before they graduate high school we decided! And in the meantime we found out that Dave Ramsey has created a Financial Peace Jr. Kit that teaches kids about smart money management that we are considering getting and going over with the little ones.

I'm excited, we don't have debt that we need to dig ourselves out of, but I think it is always good to learn to stay on top of your finances and remain in control of your spending and this seems like a good motivator to get us to recommit and do better at spending our money on experiences and plan for the future, rather than buying more "stuff". Best of all the people at Zions Bank have agreed to cover the tuition for one of our readers so that you and your entire household can attend and learn right along with us. For more details you can check out Dave Ramsey's website or Zions Bank's website or click here for a list of times, dates and locations around Utah.

***GIVEAWAY***

To enter to win a household lifetime membership from Zions Bank simply comment below and let us know that you would like to attend as well!

We also wanted to share one of our favorite family outings that shows you can have fun together and create memories as a family without spending a ton of money. In the summertime that means lots of outdoor exploration, but it gets harder in the long winter months so we have loved attending Layton Surf 'N Swims $1 open plunge on Wednesday nights.