Our Situation

So where are we now in our quest for debt freedom? I'm going to lay out our story so that hopefully if you are in a similar boat, you will see that there is hope.

I first read Dave Ramsey's book "The Total Money Makeover", in 2006 and we have been trying to dig ourselves out of the mess we had made ever since. It has been very slow going, but then we had made a lot of mistakes. Where we are now pales in comparison to where we started. Back then I felt as if there was no way we would ever get out of the mess.

When we started, we had a $50 a month payment for a computer, a $475 car payment, another car that cost us $300 a month, two school loans totaling $300 a month, and close to $10,000 in credit card debt. Not to mention our house payment. After we paid all our bills we were VERY lucky if we had $300 to pay over on something. Not a lot of wiggle room when you want to get out of debt. I felt like we were staring up at Mount Everest. Having to buy something as simple as baby gifts could throw our whole budget into a tailspin.

Fast forward to today and things have changed a lot. We are down to just one car payment (which is $100 less than it was) , house (close to $200 less than 2006) and the two school loans. Everything else has been paid off. We have managed to free up enough money in our budget to really put a dent in the things we are working on paying off and my plan is that by the end of this year we will done with the final car payment. It would be sooner but we are taking some of our money to finish part of our basement. I'll talk more about that later.

It has been frustrating at times and not easy at all but God has blessed our endeavor to handle our money more wisely. I'm really please with the progress we have made but we aren't entirely out of the woods yet. I want to get to a point where we have money saved up for our next cars before the ones we have are done for. I really don't want to have another car loan ever again.

In future posts I'll lay out what my plan is for the current year and what we are doing to maximize our efforts as well as the struggles and frustrations we face. Whether you are as bad off or worse than we were at the start or even farther down the road to freedom already, I hope you can learn from our experience and start taking control of your money in a more positive way.