I’ve written a few times about my journey to being debt free-. As a quick recap, we owed $43,000 in debt and paid it off in 3 years. It was not easy, but now that we are done I can see how much stress the debt was causing us. When I decided that my husband and I should be debt free, I read everything I could on the subject and then came to my husband with a grand plan of how we were going to do it.
The plan involved drastically cutting our budget- something that I am sure you can guess he wasn’t super happy about. We got in a big argument about it and I told him- let’s just try it out for 3 months and if it isn’t working, we can go back to how things were. So if you can’t get your partner on the same page- try that! It worked for us. He started seeing the progress and we worked hard on our goal until we paid the last student loan payment in January 2016.
I recently got a comment on my post where I talk about what to do when you first decide to get out of debt. It read:
I just read this today and it really hit home with me. I have never used a budget and I struggle with buying items to make me “happy” or feel better just to have another emotional let down and then struggling because of my weakness. This has inspired me and I have decided today that I don’t want to feel this way anymore so I am going to change.
Oh my goodness, I just wanted to hug this girl. I have been there! I was the best at buying pretty things to make me feel better. I still love buying pretty things, but the truth is that they are just things. For three years I went without anything but necessities and it was tough, but my life was still happy without all of those extra things. If you are in her shoes I just want to say that you can do it! It is possible to take control of your fiances and your life will be better for it!
If I can help anyone get out of debt, I will be a happy girl. I have been thinking about what else would be helpful if you are on the debt free journey and I came up with a free printable for you. This one is for when you first sit down and write out your debts:
This is where you can sit down and see where you are. It can be scary to actually add everything up, but if you are going to take action, you have to know where you stand! At the bottom of the sheet is a section where you can write down what your total debt payment was for the month. It is motivating to see how much money you can throw towards your goal. To get your free debt overview emailed immediately to you, just put in your information below:
[…] for the fridge of the debt we were working on so we could see the progress (I share my chart as a free download here). I paid the debt sometimes weekly so the extra money wasn’t sitting in our account tempting […]