Debt, Debt, Debt. Mounds of Debt. Debt with a capital D.
That is what we have, but it is not what we want. What we want is more of a Debt FREE kind of debt, with a Capital FREE.
There are some things you must know about us in order to truly appreciate this journey that we embarked on mid January of 2015.
- First, we are an engaged couple who live together in an apartment in the Denver Metro area.
- Second, while I graduated from DU (Go Pioneers!) back in 2010, my fiance is currently attending college to become an engineer while working full-time. He is now a sophomore, so we’ve still got a ways to go with tuition and books.
- Third and most importantly, we have big ‘ole dreams of traveling around the world and retiring on a hobby farm and doing fun stuff in between.
So where do I start? Mid-January we started Financial Peace University at one of the local churches. FPU for short, it is an awesome program by Dave Ramsey that is all about how to handle money God’s way. Though I am a stickler about money in the first place, I still learned a lot about retirement, buying a house and when to invest and how. If you don’t know anything about Dave Ramsey, I highly suggest you visit his site and click around. He’s got some free calculators you can try out – they are fun to mess around with.
I won’t go through all his principles in this post, but Dave Ramsey has 7 steps to getting out of debt, building wealth and giving. We are currently on Baby Step 2, which is Dumping Debt. This month I paid off a $1,585 personal loan I had taken out for “Code School” (I am a software developer) at a ridiculous 10% interest rate. Woot!
Our Current Debt as of March 23rd (this is after all bills have been paid):
$36,608.80
This includes my undergraduate student loans (the bulk of the debt), his car loan, and his one tiny little school loan. Oh, and my 1 credit card I can’t cut up because we are putting wedding stuff on it. I realize that some of you have way more debt than this, but this is a very large number to us and it has to go.
This number was about $10,000 higher last year when we were just dating, but when our relationship got more serious, I began paying off my loans as fast as possible. They say the number one cause of divorce in North America is money problems, and we don’t want to start out our marriage like that!
Each month I am going to update you all with our overall debt number and any goals we achieved during that month. Maybe you can do it at the same time, and we can be debt free together!
Plain Common Cent$ 