Breaking the chains!

When Clayton and I got married, we both had student loans we were paying on.  We both had to put ourselves through college.  I also had a car payment.  Neither one of us really had any debts that were outside of what the Church has said go be "good" debt - school, a home, a car.  We've never really had any credit card debt to speak of.  We use them to buy things that we pay off right away just to keep our credit good.

We decided right from the get go, we wanted to get everything paid off as quickly as possible.  I've seen what debt can do to a person's life and I wanted nothing to do with it.  I hate having it hanging over my head.  It stresses me out.  It took us a while to develop a plan of action, but after getting a copy of "One for the Money" put out by the Church, we decided that was the program we were going to follow.  For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's very, very similar to the plan out there used by Dave Ramsey.

The premise of the program is to pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first.  Then you take the money that you were paying on that one and roll it to the next highest interest rate, etc., etc. until you have paid everything off.  You are already used to that money going to something else so you don't miss it.  It also suggests using a budget.  I had already been using one before we got married, so we just adjusted it for our current situation and we still use it to this day.

I used my mad Excel skills and made up a debt repayment calendar as suggested in the program so we could see just how long it would take for us to pay everything off.  We paid off my car loan, two student loans.  We are extraordinarily close to seeing the fruits of our labors.  We have one more payment on our final student loan.  It means we will have paid off Clayton's loans more than 4 years early.  We had a bit of a hiccup in our plan.  That payment was supposed to leave us without any debt other than our mortgage.  However, life decided to throw us a bit of a curveball with the car situation.  We weren't planning on having a car payment again for a couple of years, but couldn't find a car that met our needs in our cash budget.  So we decided to get something a little more expensive that will last us for several years and we have a car payment again.  It's nothing too huge.  We've formulated a plan that will allow us to pay it off in September.  And it will allow us to start putting some of out debt reduction money into savings also.  We could pay it off sooner if we didn't put the money in savings, but with the economy the way it is, we decided it would be smart to start using some of that to build our emergency funds up a little more.

One thing that I know has helped us out in our pursuit is that we are neither one of us BIG spenders.  We'll buy nice things every once in a while, but we don't have to have the biggest and best the second it comes out.  We often wait until something dies before replacing it.  I'm not as faithful as I could be, but I discovered the fun and savings of using coupons.  Even Clayton gets excited when we are able to save a ton of money on groceries.  After this pregnancy is over and I'm back on me feet, my plan is to go full on into it.  We have a pretty decent supply of food, etc. but we aren't where we want to be with our year's supply.  We are working on it.  A lot of our problem is due to lack of storage space in our house.  We need to do some rearranging and decluttering to make more room for our long term storage needs and reorganize the shorter term food.  I've been working on that the past couple of weeks as well as putting together a supply list of what we need to get to where we want to be.

Over the years, we have seen significant blessings because of our willingness to follow the teachings of the prophets and get out of debt.  It has also helped that we always pay our tithing.  We still have our burdens, like a house that is so far underwater that I don't know that we'll ever get out from under it, but even through these difficult economic times, we've never had to worry about where our next meal will come from.

I can't wait to enter into the light at the end of the tunnel...the one that will mean we are out of debt other than our mortgage.  The one that means more money for savings and retirement.  The one that means we will be able to help others more who are in need.  The one that means we can finally be free from the chains.