Our Debt Free Journey | Financial Freedom in 2018

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Our debt free Journey | East Valley Moms Blog

I had my first child about 4 years ago. I was a teacher at the time and thought it would be easy for me to juggle motherhood and a teacher’s schedule. However, I realized that working motherhood wasn’t for me and so I left the classroom. We went down to one (teacher’s) income and needed to become debt free. 

Why?

For us, it was the only we way we could see sustaining me staying at home with our children while also saving for our future and having the wiggle room to give our kids the experiences all parents want to provide.

How?

Put it simply we followed the “baby steps” that Dave Ramsey espouses. First we needed an emergency fund of $1000, which we always maintained. And then we set out tackling our smallest debts first. We sold our car and went down to one vehicle and worked to pay off our other. Any extra money we received (gifts, bonuses, tax returns) we threw at credit card debt and eventually student loans.

We even did crazy things like sold our house and used the equity to pay off debt. My parents generously let us stay with them for a year. During that time, we saved for a new house and continued our debt snowball. But we also did small things that add up to make a big difference. For instance, we didn’t eat out maybe, but once a month for years. Instead we stuck to a meal plan that I made based upon our weekly grocery budget. We rarely buy things new. For instance our car is now more than 10 years old, but paid off. We found our”new” couch on Offer Up and not at a store. It also took us saying no to things for a while that we really wanted or outings we wanted to do. At the time, it was hard, but now, so worth it. 

We’ve been debt free for 6 months. After three years of hard work and generosity from our respective parents, we finally feel the freedom of being debt free.  We are able to breathe every month when the bills come in, we were able to take our children to Disneyland, Christmas is less a financial burden and something that can be purely fun, and lastly we can save for our future. 

Our debt free Journey | East Valley Moms Blog
We were able to take all the kids to Disneyland last October.

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