Some fun things

I’ll start off with some positive news! With a gift of money that Nate and I got and with some of our own hard-saved money, we were able to pay off some loans. We are paying off the smallest to the largest—the “debt snowball” that Dave Ramsey preaches. It feels really good to get rid of some student loans, even if they are pretty small compared to our other ones. It definitely is motivation to get “paid in full notifications,” like this one! 

I’ve been listening to Dave Ramsey a lot. Here are a couple things he constantly says: “Debt is dumb, cash is king, and the paid-off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the new status symbol of choice” and “Live like no one else so later you can live like no one else.” No matter if you like the guy or not, Nate and I are switching our state of minds to align with these principles. On Dave Ramsey’s channel on iHeartRadio, today there were some couples who did the debt free scream. It makes me feel like it’s so far away for Nate and I because we have so much debt. I don’t have any desire to do the debt free scream like the people on his show, just because I’m not like that, but I’m really looking forward to having the gratification of being debt-free. It will be such an accomplishment. Another thing that I’ve been hearing a lot on the show is couples talking about how they were able to pay off their debt. One commonality is being on the same page and being totally open with each other about budgeting and anything that has to do with money. Nate and I are totally on the same page and do a great job of communicating about money. I think that will really be an asset for us in the journey and beyond. One last thing about Dave Ramsey. He said something in one of his recent shows that resonated with me. He said something to the effect of (speaking like a spouse): “I love you so much that we are going to do this right.” To me, this means that it’s not important to have fancy new things; it’s important that we are doing something together to build our future.

I want to share something else—something that really made it clear to me why we are going on this journey. Last week Nate and I talked a bit about what our budget will be like (starting in January). Usually I get frustrated talking about money specific things because I easily become either disinterested or confused. But this time, I got to clearly see how much money we are going to allocate to different things, and it’s do-able. (Side note—I’m sure Nate will disclose what our budget is in a later post.) We are even going to budget for date nights twice a month. Yes, we could put that money toward the loans, but we want to actually enjoy being a married couple. We want to be able to go out and do fun things together and treasure this special time in our lives. Anyway, something that Nate said made it clear to me why we are doing this. He said that he doesn’t want to do this—become debt-free—for him, or us necessarily, he wants to do it for our future children. To me, that means so, so much.

Here are some other tidbits in our newlywed life together. AKA doing responsible, not fun, adult, married things.

• We went to the bank the other weekend to open up a joint checking account. That was fun. The “personal banker” kept on saying “Okay, good to know, good to knowwwwwww.” It took way too long and was super annoying. No, I do not want a Wells Fargo mortgage now. Or ever.
• We finally got a Target REDcard. I’m sure a lot of you either know about it or have one. It’s a debit card that is linked to your bank account and you get 5% off your purchases. 5% off, obviously, is not an amount to jump up and down about, but it all adds up in the end. And I’ve just discovered Cartwheel. So, I’m having, errrrr, “fun” finding Target coupons and Cartwheel deals to combine with using my REDcard to save as much money as I can at Target for the things that we need. Now the cashiers at Target can stop making me feel guilty for not having the damn FREE card that saves you money!
• We had a “check in” meeting with Nate’s insurance agent. That was, as you can imagine, thrilling.   

We are off to Mexico next week for a wedding and our honeymoon. Woohoo!

Back to Business

Well, this post is long past due; however, I feel I have a pretty decent excuse. Okay, not an excuse at all, and more than just pretty decent if it were one. 5 weeks ago today I was in Northfield, MN, helping set up for the most special day of my life. And no it was not a Super Bowl party for the Vikings; 1) because it’s only October; and 2) well, it’s the Vikings that we all hate to love. It was special because it was the day all my close friends and family gathered together to witness and celebrate Shaina and I’s profession of love and faithfulness to one another. Yep, life goal #1 is in the books, we are married! And I couldn't be happier. It has truly been a long process planning, organizing and inattentively shaking my head yes or no to a plethora of decisions in which my opinion would obviously be trumped anyway. And for good reason too. Our wedding day was amazing, and not because of my own great taste in décor or obsession with Pinterest.

Now that the dust has almost settled, both figuratively and literally, as we work at cleaning our increasingly shrinking apartment to make room for our newly-wed life together, complete with gifts, new décor, china cabinets and the like, and no where to put any of it, the official start of this massive project and life overhaul is ever looming. It’s back to reality.

Once topic I wanted to touch on, and one of the driving forces and motivations behind this process, is a comment that my now gorgeous wife made in her last post when referring to her needing a reminder of why we are doing this when:

           

            “…when we are knee-deep into hardcore budgeting and I hate dislike my life because we are so

broke and can’t do anything we want to do.”

This hits home for me. On one side I feel saddened. Who wants to make their wife feel like she can’t do what she wants to do? I know she is totally on board with this, as we've discussed this on more than just a few occasions. But I wanted to bring to light another aspect of this. Will we have to sacrifice during this process to tackle this monster head-on? Of course. However, have we not already been sacrificing in certain areas of our life because of this debt? We absolutely have. Both my wife and I have been blessed with decent jobs, and yet we already sacrifice doing things we want to just because these loan payments cause us to live close to paycheck-to-paycheck. Now I know what my wife meant when she said what she did, and in no way is this an example of us being on two different pages. The fact is that we will have to sacrifice to be able to reach this goal of paying off our large amount of debt. Probably more than we already are. But I would much rather roll up our sleeves and sacrifice a little more now, than be forced to continue our lives constrained by our financial situation. If we don’t address this now, then chances are we never will. Dave Ramsey said it best, “Live like no one else, so later, you can live like no one else.”

Now on to the “meat and potatoes” of this post; the numbers, the facts, the spreadsheets; pretty much Shaina’s worst nightmare. To help organize things a little bit and possibly keep Shaina’s eyes from rolling back in her head every time she sees a spreadsheet, I set out to find an online tool to help track our debt in one spot that was easy to use and also a little nicer to look at than the blinding white of an accountant’s spreadsheet, to which the most creative formatting you’ll find is bold headers. The site I found is called Undebt.it.  It’s a super duper simple website, used to track debt. The thing I like most about it is the fact that it’s still totally manual. No linking of four or five debt or bank accounts. As an accountant I like to be in control of my numbers, and this allows me that control. The tool will then organize the loans in a payoff order and will calculate how much I should pay towards each loan every month once our extra payments start. The philosophy is simple: pay minimum payments on all loans except one, making a larger extra payment on the first loan in the payoff list until it’s paid off. Next, the extra payment, along with the first loan’s minimum payment (which is now freed up by paying it off), is then applied to the second loan and so on, making the available funds to be applied to each loan greater and greater as we begin to pay each loan off. Hence the term “The Debt Snow Ball” Since it has been a few months of minimum payments since our last posts, I’ll give a quick update as to where our numbers are at. We had received a gracious gift of money that helped us get a jump start on our snowball as you can see from the loans with a zero balance. And even though the majority of it was a gift, it truly does feel great to pay off some of these loans. Again is wasn't a lot, but seeing the loan at a zero really does provide an emotional boost.

As you can see we are now at about $123,832 in debt, and minimum payments are still high at $1,429 a month. The feature of this site that really catches my attention is the paid off percentage meter next to each loan. Since I set this account up on Undebt.it we've only paid off 7.09% of our debt. 7.09%! That’s it! We were paying $1,518 a month for three months, added a gift of money to the mix (to which we were able to pay off four different loans, one of which was a private loan at 12% interest!) and only 7.09% done. That’s ridiculous! I can’t wait for this percentage to get larger, and a lot quicker at that. And I like that we can easily and quickly track our progress. I’m hoping it will keep our motivation strong.

In my next post I will to go over how we plan to budget during this project and how we will use this as a tool to come together as a team.