Saturday, September 5, 2015

Summer 2015

So its been awhile since I have sat down to document any updates on this blog thanks to Facebook so here it goes. 




Jake started Second Grade!He has been homesick for his parents and crying most days (but so does his best friend Rylan) Rylan's mom Danielle and I don't know why this is. Hopefully we will look back and laugh at this season. He is also bored at school, I guess a good problem to have. I e-mailed his teacher, Ms. Koon and she is reaching out to the AIG (gifted) teacher, Mr. Blackburn to see if we can get him tested. Either way I just hope he is challenged enough at school. 


Today is the first football Game of the season against Howard. Hoping for a great year and a Bowl trip. Jae loves football and says he is going to play in the NFL.


Beach trip was fun this year. Took one of Jake's closest friends, Gabe and did lots of wakeboarding.



Out for a day of golf. Thanks to being debt free we now have a golf/pool membership at Cedar Rock and have had fun this summer enjoying it. Jake also loves to golf. 



During the beach trip we also spent some time in Atlanta where we took Brooks to his first Movie in a movie theater (he is 2.5) to see the Minions and he did great.


Life is good. We are busy with our jobs as Josh is the Assistant Athletic Director for Football Ops and I am the Director of Population Health Data Management which is growing rapidly at the Y.  Jake has just started soccer. We are enjoying being debt free, saving our emergency fun and for our 10th Anniversary trip down to Seaside in March. 

Friday, May 29, 2015

How we paid off everything (but the house)


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!




Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Snow/Ice Day

So today we are home on our second snow day in a row. These have been fun for Jake as he has so many neighbors to play with. So he has been going from Talan, to Gabe to Lucas to Sydney's house playing. Not a bad "snow day". He did get some sledding in with Josh before Josh went to work.

See even if the roads are icy Josh still has to be at work. Although its off season we still had spring practice at 11:30 yesterday AND they are interviewing for the new AD this week so he has to sit in all of the interviews. Luckily he got there and back safely and luckily with my new job I can work from home.

We were supposed to go to Atlanta this weekend and I had already taken off butthe weather is going to be nasty and icy and so we are staying here, Jake also wanted to go to football practice with Josh on Saturday. We are off to SC the following weekend for my nephew Daylen's 3rd birthday party.

As far as the house goes we have had a LOT of views on zillow. I put it on facebook again yesterday since it was a snow day and everyone was home and we got a record 470 views. Now if we could only get some showings. We were supposed to have a group of  Realtors look at it today but we had to reschedule because of the weather. I am hoping for June 1st so it gives us enough time to save up for the realtor fees and down pay.

I also have been busy volunteering as the Finance Advisor for our newest chapter of AGD at App State. Below is a pic of the very first Executive Council.



Below we went to Big Lots and as we were leaving we saw a table taking donations for a little girl having ASD repair surgery, we donated and left. On the way home jake decided he wanted to go grab his giving jar where he saves money to give and go back and donate it all to the little girl.

Here is a pic of Jake playing xbox one, his new favorite thing.