And I am SUPER excited to announce that...
WE'RE DEBT FREE!! (except for our home)
We got on to Dave Ramsey's (Debt Snowball) plan in June of 2008 when we first got married. Learning how to live on a budget was interesting at first but now I wouldn't have it any other way. We have had to sacrifice doing fun things with friends, not going to certain places, not eating out because it "wasn't in the envelope"....but 34 months later (almost 3 years) we have finished paying off all of our debt. A total of $36,000. We started with 6 different debts and we now have 0!!
The past 10 weeks Justin and I have had a wonderful opportunity to teach Dave's Financial Peace University class at our church. We have a small group of 9 people and we are really enjoying teaching Dave's principles about money and finances. We began to get more and more motivated from teaching the class to pay off the rest of our debt so we tweaked some things in our budget to make it happen. At the beginning of teaching our class we knew we wanted to try and have our debt paid off during the 13 weeks and with 2 weeks to go...we did it! It felt so good last Friday to make that final payment on my student loan (Good bye Sally-Mae!!) What a great feeling to know that we don't owe money to anyone (except our house of course)....we are excited for the opportunities this is going to give our future and we are especially excited for Coleman because we have changed our family tree! Now on to Baby Step 3, then 4-7!!
Here is a picture of the last 5 links on our "debt" chain. We had different paper chains representing each debt and we'd take off a link (each representing a certain amount) as we paid off our debt. We hung them in our bedroom so we could see the progress and stay motivated. The last few weeks we brought the chain out into our main living area (kitchen/living room) and hung it up so we could really see our progress and stay focused!! Can you see the HAPPINESS??
Way to go!!!!
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