Let's talk about Money

It's no secret that we are what I call poor. We live in a little (but nice) house, we are now a one car family ever since I started staying home, we don't get to go on fabulous vacations or shop in designer stores buuut we have big plans. HUGE plans for the future.

You see there was a time where we had credit cards to every store:
Old Navy
Victoria's Secret
Best Buy
Dillards
Macys

We had a few Visa and Mastercards too.

Add a couple of $500/month car payments and we were sunk.


We learned our lesson early and we learned it fast. If you can't pay for it in cash (excluding a mortgage) you don't need it. So now if we want something or want to do something we pull out our wad of cash or swipe our debit card.

We are trying to secure our future for our retirement (we don't want to work past 55) and we are trying to be able to pay for Annabelle's college. We are very lucky that the handsome husband's job provides him a pension and we pay into it monthly too.

I don't want to act like we are Dave Ramsey or anything, but we are trying really really hard to get ourselves debt free as soon as we can. It's simple, I don't want to owe anyone anything. We went to a Dave Ramsey seminar once and he said over and over "the borrower is slave to the lender" And it so so so true. Think about it. You owe money for your mortgage, your credit cards and your car. You have to go to work everyday to be able to afford to make your payments. Your mortgage is probably a 30 year right? So for 30 years you are forced to go to work every single day so you can pay the money back. We just didn't want to live like that. I didn't want to have to do anything for anyone except my family.

Which brings me back to our small house. I've said before that our house is right around 1000 sq ft, it is plenty big for the 3 of us and if I ever start to think that it is too small I remember that both of my grandmas raised 4 kids in this size of a house. We don't NEED a 3000 sq ft house, would it be nice to have larger rooms and a larger bathroom? YES! will it be even more nice to not owe on a house until I am 54? YES

Like I said, we are not perfect and we have made some really really poor decisions in the past. We are trying to move past them and learn from them to make the future better.

Someday soon I will write more about our house financing.

What do you think? Do you think we are crazy people? Or is this how to strive to live too?

--Mel