January 1st, 2009 - Day #1 on our journey to a debt free life!!

Welcome to my life and my blog. I really hate debt, and thats what this blog is about. Here's a quick intro... In the past 5 years that my husband and I have been married, we've enjoyed alot of things. Cruises, nice cars, a great house, the freedom to buy pretty much whatever we wanted for our kids and ourselves. However, it has all come to us at a price. We, like most Americans, have justified buying on credit and financing the things we just dont have cash for. Afterall, most people do it! We never thought twice about buying things "on credit" because thats just the way things are, right? No!! I recently began listening to Dave Ramsey. If you haven't had a chance to yet, download a few podcasts and you will start catching on pretty quickly. Its just so sad that nearly everyone in the country thinks like this, that credit and debt are a normal and acceptable part of life.

It took me some time, but I convinced my husband and beginning today, we have begun our Dave Ramsey program. Its simple really, don't buy crap you don't need, and pay off your debt!! After that, there are other steps to follow of course, to help with our goal of having a great retirement, being able to help the kids through college, and give like we never have before!! My goal is to spend very little, and increase our incomes significantly to do this. I will be starting a coupon program called Grocery Smarts, and will blog about this as I learn to use the program, since I just started learning about it. (We spent nearly $1400 on food in December of 2008, so my goal is to reduce our grocery bill to $300 by using this program and also cutting fast food and restaurants out of our "whats for dinner" options"

I hope this will be a place I can share the ups and downs of our journey as we try to accomplish our goal for 2009, which is to pay off approximately $70,000 worth of debt. (You can laugh all you want!!) We can do it will some self control, discipline and alot of hard work from both of us. We will both have to work a little more than we'd like to, give up a lot of things we really enjoy, and I'm planning on ebaying everything except the kids to become debt free. Good luck to us!

Happy New Year everyone!!!