One amazing thing about marriage is that you now have to combine the way 2 people spend into 1 lifestyle. And you also have to combine the debt of 2 people into 1. Which in our case doubled our debit, for D and I our main debt is my house and his school. Surprisingly we both brought in almost equal amounts of debt. But to be honest to look at the number on the excel sheet I have made makes me want to puke! So after a few months of living life the way we usually do and seeing only small amounts drop off the bottom line I purposed to D that we go on a spending diet for 2013. He totally agreed!
As all of this is in my head I wanted to put it out for the world to see. Here are things we are doing.
1. We want to pay off as much debt as we can this year.
2. We have given each other a $100 allowance each month, this $ can be spent on anything or saved up. We are both gift givers and social people so this is where this money will come into play the most.
3. We will not eat out, go to coffee or the movies unless we have a gift card to use, are using some of our monthly allowance or someone else is paying. We have talked through some strategies for this since we enjoying going out and having fun with friends, for example we might share a meal, have water instead of soda and bring a coupon!
4. We won't be buying new clothes unless we NEED them, which means we need a smaller size, we have a gift card or use our allowance. Here is a great read on weather or not to justify the expense.
5. We also will live this year with a WANT/NEED motto.
6. We will continue to tithe to our church, when times get though in the past this has seemed like the easiest thing to cut. But in all honesty everything we have is God's and he has given us so much. So to give back 10% really isn't much. It's the first thing we will do each paycheck, and we are excited to continue giving.
I'm excited to see where this will put us at the beginning of 2014, I really feel like now is the time to do it. Compared to wanting until kids are in the picture and we have no savings to send them to school or pay for a wedding. We both feel strongly that we want to provide for our kids and not have to work until we die. We both want to travel and enjoy the things around us, but we both know we can't do it without $ and being in debt is no way to move forward.
So here is to a future of debt free living and as Dave Ramsey says...“Live like no one else now so later you can live like no one else.”
Good Luck!!! I think the biggest thing we learned from FPU is you will mess up and so will he, but you can't change it only change what you do forward. We have really slacked on our cash budget, but everytime we go back to it I always feel such a sense of relief.
ReplyDeleteWe have deemed this year of a year of simplifying. Getting rid of things we don't need/use. Either selling them to put toward our debt or giving them away.