Our journey to financial freedom ;)

Can you tell by the title that we read the Dave Ramsey book? Lol

I'm going to be totally open and honest here...since no one reads this blog except for me anyway ;). I might appreciate this information one day!

Once upon a time, we bought a house! And we LOVE IT!! But in order to afford the down payment...we ended up putting all of our living expenses on a credit card for a month, to free up our cash. It worked, lol. But may not have been the smartest plan. After we moved in, we fell into the new home owners trap of wanting to make this our dream home RIGHT NOW. Cue, many trips to Home Depot a week, most of those amounting to at least $100. Many times it was much more than that. Before we knew it, we owed about $1200 on one credit card, and $1200 on another and just COULD NOT get those numbers down. We had a "loose budget" but it wasn't working well, still...we weren't terribly stressed because we knew that all it would take is one paycheck with some good over time on it and we would be fine. 

When all of a sudden, we decided to go on a trip to Biston to see Nicks sister and the Fam for the Fourth of July.

(A totally amazing trip by the way!)

Anyway. On our way home, we got bored and decided, on a whim, to listen to the Dave Ramsey book (Total Money Makeover) with an extra audible credit that we have. And we were forever changed...haha. That sounds so dramatic! But appropriately so. The biggest thing that we walked away from that book learning is that it doesn't matter how much money we make every month, if we're in debt..we're broke.

So, we determind that we were totally broke, and committed ourselves to following his baby steps. 

So on our way home, we stopped at the bank, pulled out some cash, and switched to the envelope system for the remainder of the month. And in just THREE WEEKS of totally cracking down on our spending and following Daves "Baby Steps" we have almost paid off both credit cards AND are prepared to pay cash for Dereks unexpected tonsillectomy from last week, which is going to be costing us about $1100. Not bad for a months work! 

It has been a bit of an adjustment, we have about $10 of free spending money a month for the whole family worked into our budget. And have cut our food budget from about $500 a month, to $360. This all required extensive planning, which sometimes feels like a part time job, but seeing the debt disappear makes it all SOOOOO worth it. Once we're  done with the credit cards, we'll be tackling our student loans. We have a plan to be completely out of debt (except for the house...which we'll tackle later!) in about 16 months. $43k in 16 months! Wish us luck :)