So Dave and I haven't always been friends over these past three years since he came into my life. You see I have a spending problem and I LOVE clothes. When Stephen and I first got married I pretty much bought a new outfit every week. This was fine and dandy, but the problem was that we had a ton of credit card debt. When you are in pharmacy school and your financial aid doesn't come through, a semester of living on credit adds up quickly. So we started in a huge hole and weren't really making an effort to fill it up.
Then enters Dave. What a great idea, get out of debt and quickly. While we do not follow his plan to a T we are trying. Our debt snow ball is HUGE: credit cards, cars, the house, and financial aid. Note I list financial aid last; our payments are more than our mortgage :( With this in mind I cannot explain to you how overwhelming the idea of the snowball has been and how it feels like we are doing absolutely nothing! Then add to all that the air conditioner. About six months into our journey it broke, and when I say it broke I mean the outside unit and the attic unit all had to be replaced to the tune of $10,000. Well when you're in the midst of trying to get out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt which seems impossible to begin with, and then you add another ten at the snap of a finger, you just feel like crying and giving up! So for the first year of my teaching career, every single pay check for the first six months minus our tithe, went to pay for that stupid air conditioner. I realize this is what would be called a first world problem and I am absolutely grateful to live in a country where air conditioners are considered an absolute necessity, but when you realize everything awful that's happening during your first year of teaching is all so you can have an airconditioner, it's frustrating to say the least. So once we had the ac paid for, then we went back to the snow ball. It's overwhelming and at times you truly can't see the trees from the forest. Is anything even happening?
Well yesterday those trees separated from the forest. I am so glad to officially say that we are not only credit card debt free, but also one car note down with the second soon to follow in the next couple of months! Now that we've gotten the small, but big things out of the way, we can start paying HUGE chunks on the the other car and then the house and financial aid.
Like I said, we don't follow him exactly, but what we are doing what seems to finally be working. (Really it was working all along, we just couldn't see it.) I feel like we make way better financial decisions, with room for slip ups every now and then, and God is blessing us.
One of the decisions I'm most proud of was the route we took when purchasing our new house in Nac. Rather than building that dream home we would live in for the rest of our lives, we decided to go practical. We upgraded in size, large enough to have plenty of space for the size family we want (I would like to side note that while we had a "number" of kids we wanted, at this point we will be grateful for just one.) but not new and in a price range that we could have it paid off in fifteen years. The coolest thing is that after all the paper work was said and done and we knew exactly what our mortgage was going to be, we decided to pay an extra $500.00 a month which is going to translate to having it paid off in 8-10 years! And we LOVE the house and the only "work" we are doing to it is on the outside with the yard. We were also able to furnish the new house and new rooms with all used furniture. It really is amazing all the deals we found at the time of the move. It was almost like we were being blessed for being frugal. I got exactly what I wanted and at way discounted prices!
So we are trying. We aren't perfect Dave Ramsey students and we still have WAY too much fun sometimes with our spending (but all with cash!) but we are doing it and the snow ball just increased its speed from 5mph to about 70mph!
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