Discipline is Great? Being Debt Free.

Biceps and I have been on the path to becoming completely debt free. We aren’t credit card users and we have always bought our cars cash, but we do still owe on my student loans, our rentals and our personal home.

Using Dave Ramsey’s mortgage calculator, we trimmed our budget in order to accelerate our payoff schedules on each debt that we have (student loans, rent houses and our personal home).

Trimming our budget means opting for picnics instead of fancy dinners, watching limited basic cable on our 27″ ginormous old-school t.v. …

…sharing one car instead of buying a second dream car,

…me biking almost everywhere on this cheapo deapo bike…

…and finding cheaper ways to live (making my own face wash, facial moisturizer, lip balm etc).

This also means any improvement that I do on our home (i.e. redoing our living and dining rooms with these awesome colors), must be paid for by extra income or selling something in the house we no longer need.

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Lord willing, we will have my student loans paid off in two years…

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our rental houses paid off in four years…

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and our home paid off in six years.

This means that by the time we have one of these hooligans-our only bills will be electricity, water and cell phones. Which I am trying to figure out a way to get around paying for these, too.

I think I could live off of candle power, roof water and a tin can for a phone. Not sure about Biceps, though. He’s pretty pampered.

The reason that I’m telling you our financial goals is to help me maintain my motivation when I want to splurge on something. I will feel accountable to you and remind myself that it’s not part of The Plan.

I don’t really ever need another new shirt, a fancy bottle of wine or more camera equipment. What I need-truly need–is:
to “owe no man anything” and
to have ability to serve others with my time by becoming free from the enslavement of working to own something.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, we will be completely debt free in 2018.

Discipline is tough when I want to spend but am the only one that can close the wallet. It’s sometimes embarrassing when everyone else wants to order drinks and we ask for water. However, the sacrifice and the discipline will be more than worth it when I write that last check to our bank.

And on the memo line of that last check, I will write-“It’s been interesting.”