WE DID IT!
Although we didn't truly begin "the plan" until Feb 2012 I would say it all started January 1, 2011 with
90K in debt. My Honda Civic's air conditioning/heat went out and the car had 180K miles on it so I decided to turn it in and get another (brand new civic). Josh had wanted to take a deal where we turned in his Santa Fe and my civic for 2 new cars. The problem is, that would be 10K more in debt than the 22K this new civic was already going to cost us, so I vetoed the 2nd new car. I guess that is when you can say I started becoming more aware of our debt. Problem was between living paycheck to paycheck and the cost of gas and daycare I didn't really think we could put anything extra to our debt.
Fast forward to Oct 2011 and I had written something in a notebook showing each of our debts, which at that point totaled
76K. I had never thought of it as a real problem, car and school loan debt seemed normal, didn't everyone have those? We threw about 10K to the problem at got down to about 70K.
Dave Ramsey says with weight loss, or any other big change, it takes a breaking point, where you can not take any more, to make a change. Our breaking point was in Feb 2012.
Josh and I had spent the first 6 years of our marriage with separate bank accounts. If we were going to get serious about this debt stuff I told him we needed to only have 1 married bank account. Well when he switched over his car payment to our joint account. Something didn't work right and where we thought we had extra money we actually didn't pay the car payment in January and had to pay DOUBLE in February. I was mad to say the least. I had had enough. We had extra money in the bank to cover it thanks to Obama's new house get 8K plan but I was tired of living by just getting to the next 1st of the month. We had to make a change.
So from February 2012 forward we started using Mint.com and an Excel spreadsheet to track our expenses, budget, and start paying down our debt. By the end of the year we had paid off my car and cash flowed Josh's braces at 2,500.
2013 we paid off Josh's car and bought a new couch with money my grandmother had given us. So we weren't exactly not buying ANYTHING although we only allowed ourselves $40 each per month for incidentals, nearly no clothing money. Jake starting Kindergarten helped by cutting daycare from 600 a month to 130 for afterschool. If we went on vacation my family can attest to the fact we only used cash (from stuff we sold at yard sales).
2014 started out slowly for debt, the goal was to pay off Josh's student loan. We had a couple hiccups along the way paying for a trip to Chicago for my grandfathers funeral and my hernia surgery (2K). With Josh's new promotion and some extra income we decided to enjoy Christmas and buy Jake an Xbox and go to the Steelers/Falcons game. We ended the year paying off Josh's student loans. YAY!
2015
One loan left to go. $13,720. We had decided to put the last part of the snowball on hold to take advantage of scraping together a downpayment for a new house. The last loan is at 1.25% so luckily it really wouldn't grow in the meantime. After 2 months with our house on the market we decided we wanted to go back to plan A, we put all of the money we had saved up for the down payment towards my student loans and then decided we were done, we were ready to be DEBT FREE so on May, 29th, 2015 we took the rest of our savings plus some paycheck and socked it all to the loan.
So this has been a long journey looking back at the last 3.5 years. But we are so glad that we did it for our family. Going forward we will be paying CASH for everything and hopefully maybe in 5 years or so work to pay off our house. For now we want to enjoy life, we have a 10 year anniversary trip and hopefully a trip to Disney in 2016 to celebrate. All paid in CASH.
I want people to know that if we can do it anyone can do it. We don't make 6 figures, we had other bumps in the road like braces, funerals, couches and the like. But we did it in the end, together as a family. Now we can live and GIVE hopefully like no one else. Yes, we will next be saving up for Josh's car which has 170K miles on it and then mine which is not far behind at 140K mikes. But we can save for retirement and Jake's college, we can give to the many needs that come up within our friends and our community and our church. Thanks to our friends and family who walked alongside us in this journey, sometimes thinking we were crazy and "no fun" we had a goal in mind and we wanted to attain it.
I am hoping in the future I can start teaching Financial Peace University classes (Dave Ramsey's program) to those in my community. It has changed our lives and I hope it can change others!
