Our Debt-Free Journey!
We paid off $82,000 in 32 months making $60 to $80,000 a year.
That is an impossibly shocking statement. The shocking part is that it’s true.
A journey started
I remember how this journey started, the first time my husband, Aaron and I sat down to work out our budget. Our second daughter had just been born and I was staying mostly at home looking after two small children. Aaron was working full-time as a nurse and going to school part time to become a nurse practitioner. Very busy! I was at home most of the time so handling the day-to-day finances was something I could take over for our family, something Aaron didn’t have to do by himself anymore. It would be a small load off while he focused on work and school.
We sat down at our large wooden table with the laptop. I had already started to make a budget on excel, neat little boxes for our grocery budget and utility bills. Aaron had showed me all the log ons to pay our bills automatically online. Basically, I didn’t know any of this stuff before this.
I didn’t really know what was going on with our money. I knew we had enough to cover our bills, but that’s about it. And let me just say this is entirely my fault. Aaron was completely open and honest, I just chose to ignore. Early on in our marriage I would say, “I hate money. I’ll just make it and you figure out what to do with it.” Because of this, every two to three months, I would have a panic attack. The anxiety would spill out it so many questions: “Do we have enough money? How much do we have? Why do I feel this way with money?”
Because I didn’t know what in the world was going on with our finances. That’s why.
I look back at that and think, “Wow, how naive!” Good thing my husband is kind and trustworthy.
On so many levels this is unwise, but mainly it was very unfair to my husband to have the financial burden solely on him. We should have been looking after our finances as a team.
At first, I was optimistic about where our finances were. We had even talked about taking a trip to Montana for our 10th anniversary. I clicked over on the excel spreadsheet and moved the cursor to the debt portion of our budget: truck payment and student loans. We clicked through to the truck payment loan with 5/3 Bank.
The beautiful dark green Ford F-150 rolled into our driveway three years ago.
On the account, I saw the small black numbers of the remaining balance: $18,000. What? We still had 18,000 on the loan we had been paying for for three years?! And why do we have a loan with a bank that is named with an improper fraction? That doesn’t seem good! My thoughts swirled. I blinked hard and felt a large lump in my chest, like when you accidentally swallow a piece of ice and the chunk slowly and painfully moves down your throat.
I was in hyperventilation mode. I felt the same familiar anxiety attack coming on strong.
Then we moved to the student loan account. I knew this was going to be a big one. I braced myself and took a deep breath before looking at the amount. A big $60,000 stared back at me. It was the first time I had ever seen the number concretely. Before they were just abstract objects, lines and zeros I pulled in and out of time and space. At first, the student loan debt seemed so far in the future. When you are 22, you think, “We’ll pay that when we are older and making more money.” You imagine your 32-year-old self working a six-figure job wearing a black power suit. Well, we were definitely older, but not making lots of money, good money, but not lots. And no one was wearing a power suit.
I was angry.
I was so pissed. My 32-year old self hated by 21-year old self for being so unwise. I was furious at our lackadaisical attitude that “everyone has debt”; “you’ll always be in debt”. It’s part of the American way of life, right? It never even occurred to me you could live your life without it. And guess what you have when you don’t have debt? Money!
Debt steals your future.
That is what I realized that day and was most angry about. You see, we were under the thinking that if you have $350 dollars in your monthly budget then you could afford a car loan. And technically you can. We paid the payments on time every month. But in all of these payments, we weren’t paying ourselves. We had no money left over at the end of the month for future dreams we had. There would be no trips to Montana for our 10th anniversary. There would be loan payments. Lots and lots of loan payments. And for how long? The next decade?
With debt, we would never get to be generous because we were constantly paying back what we had already spent. I longed for the time when we could be generous with our money - give to people in need, even maybe buy a car for a single mom some time, help pay for a child’s adoption. But none of that could happen with monthly payments, because there is no money left at the end of the month.
It was all just so frustrating.
While I was fuming about our squashed future, I looked over at my husband. His head was down, avoiding eye contact. His usually large upper body pulled in tight as if he were trying to roll himself up and disappear.
I felt anger looking at those big, awful numbers, but Aaron felt shame.
He was the one who wanted a $40,000 truck. He was the one with the student loans, $30,000 of which was for the broken dream of medical school.
The crazy, amazing, Holy Spirit thing of it all was that I was never mad at my husband. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I get mad at him sometimes and we definitely didn’t see eye to eye on all of this debt-free journey. But I never blamed him or resented him for this debt. We humans tend to point the blame finger. “It’s his debt! He needs to take care of it!” Nope, I signed on to this too. I agreed to this. We made these decisions together. I was just as responsible as he was. We would get out from under all this debt together too.
Right there in the dining room of our home, I refused to let debt steal any more of our future.
But Aaron was a little harder to convince...
Not Quite on the Same Page
Aaron felt that shame so strongly that he couldn’t quite understand how we were ever going to clean the mess up. Maybe you are there too. In his mind, the pile of mistakes and poor decisions needed a punishment. He thought it would be ten years before we would ever be free. How could we pay more when everything was already so tight already?
We didn’t always agree about this journey. The first 3 months after that initial sit down we had more fights about money than we had in our entire 10 years of marriage. Many would end up with me feeling anger while Aaron experienced quiet sadness and shame.
But we were waking up to our mistakes.
Like many things in our marriage, we viewed it from opposite sides of the room. He and his ideas in one corner and my complete opposite viewpoints in another. But, we walked to the middle in compromise. We came together in agreement.
I wanted the debt gone yesterday and Aaron truly believed at the start of this we would be in debt for a decade. “Well, let’s just start and see what happens,” I said.
The Plan
It is amazing when you make a budget. It’s like giving yourself a raise. In the past, it felt like money slipped through our fingers. Where did it all go?
We trimmed our budget down to nothing. Aaron picked up extra overtime. As soon as we decided to get out of debt, a bunch of online courses opened up for me to teach. (Coincidence, I think not.)
We had guidance from Dave Ramsey and his team. You should definitely check him out if you are looking to get out of debt. His baby steps organize it in a way that is clear and practical.
Basically, we earned money and didn’t spend it. Our multiple out to eat meals per week stopped. I didn’t peruse the Target aisle. Aaron stopped buying things at Lowe’s.
Seeing the Hope
With the little savings we had, a scholarship Aaron received and with all the extra money we earned and didn’t spend, we paid off the truck in 7 months.
$18,000 in 7 months.
How was this possible? We realized by paying off the truck, if you are intentional with your money and know where every dollar is going, its like you gave yourself a raise. Money would fly out of the bank account and we wondered where it went. Not any more.
Paying off the truck let hope arise. We could see it. We could feel this plan working. We knew God was in this. He was changing our hearts and minds while helping us with this freedom.
Seeing that hope really propelled us forward. It broke down the lies that had we listened to from ourselves and the enemy. Our fixed mindset slowly turned into a growth mindset as the debt started to roll away.
The First $30,000 of the Student Loans
Out of the entire journey, this chunk of money was the hardest. It was that last lingering vestige of doubt and shame. This $30,000 was from a failed year of Medical School for Aaron. It was a death of a dream. He knew nothing other than being a doctor and when it didn’t work out it sent him into a depression I had never seen in him before. But the Lord is good. Little by little, Aaron found his calling in nursing. No experience was wasted. God revealed to him that his true purpose and identity didn’t belong in what he did.
Aaron is now a bad a** in a Cardiac ICU and is a specialist for a life support system called ECMO. He absolutely excels at it and loves it. But the debt remained. All other aspects of this situation had been healed except the blasted money.
Emotionally, this debt felt different than the truck. It was battling that death of a dream again. It took quiet determination to conquer this debt. It was hard, but in 2018 we paid of the $30,000 medical school loan. Aaron was finally free spiritually, physically and financially from that burden.
Find a Support System
We knew when we paid off the first $30,000 of the student loans, we could pay of the rest. 2019 was our last year of debt!
I won’t say it was easy. There were times when the money didn’t come in quickly, where we felt stuck. But there were amazing blessings as well. Many of those blessings came in the amazing support of our parents, family and friends. Both sets of parents graciously babysat grandchildren while we were working. They bought consignment sale clothes and toys for us. In their own ways, our family was a huge support to this journey.
Another huge blessing was a gift from Aaron’s grandparents. I had gone down with the girls over Fall Break for a visit to their home in Tupelo, MS. They knew about our debt-free journey. Each time we spoke with them, they encouraged us and asked how it was going.
During this visit, I sat in the warm kitchen encircled by the bay window. Gramma shared a bowl of chips and guacamole with me for an afternoon snack.
“I just wanted to say how proud we are of you both of you for tackling this debt,” she started.
“Thank you,” I said, munching on a chip.
“Grampa and I want to give you money.”
“Oh no,” I argued. “I can’t take your money.”
Gramma stopped me. “We want to be a part of what you are doing.”
Grandpa chimed in, “We want to see our legacy when we are alive.”
Tears welled in my eyes. I was so thankful, so grateful, not only for the money but to be seen, to be acknowledged and understood.
That money made it possible for us to finish paying the debt in 2019.
How We Did It:
You are probably wondering, “How did you actually do it?” How do you pay $82K when you thought there was no extra money. Here are a few practical ways that we earned and saved money to apply to our debt:
Be Intentional
Every dollar has a purpose. We used the free app, Every Dollar. It was so helpful to be able to track the budget together in one place digitally. We could check it on our phones wherever we were and add transactions immediately.
Be Creative
We put a little more than $10,000 towards our debt from scholarships. Aaron is in a doctoral program that his work is paying for, but there are living expenses and merit scholarships out there that don’t have to be directly applied to tuition. We never would have found these if we hadn’t decided to get out of debt fast.
Be A Smart Shopper
We switched which grocery store we shopped at. Any Aldi fans out there? By buying most of our groceries at Aldi every week, we saved 30%.
Hands down, this was one of the biggest things that saved us money. I could write a whole blog post about how to save money on your grocery bill, but a big way is to shop somewhere else.
Say Yes
We didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing work we did. We just said yes. Say yes to any legal thing that makes you money. Overtime, call time, teaching extra courses, teaching private lessons, yard sales, and Facebook marketplacing items were all ways we made extra cash.
Say No
Say no to extra stuff that is not in your budget. For us, this meant eating out, expensive date nights, expensive kid activities, shopping trips, new stuff for our house, home updates, etc.
We did a few of these, but we always felt like we had to say yes to everything before. We saved a lot of money by saying no.
Motivate Yourself
There are lots of ways to keep your motivation going. You know yourself better than anyone so choose things that work for you. Here is some of what we did:
Make a sign. This may seem trivial, but put up some sort of visual marker of your progress where you can see it regularly. We had a little chart of 64 boxes on it, each one marking $1000 of our student loan debt. Getting able to check off a box when we had reached that $1,000 was very satisfying and helped us see our progress clearly.
Have some fun with your journey. We marked out milestones with certain smaller projects we did for the house. Those little $200 gifts were like tiny little breadcrumbs showing us how far we had come. For example, we got a new bathroom faucet for our master bathroom vanity when we hit $10,000. At $40,000 we got a new TV on sale for our basement.
Celebrate at the End! The last and final motivation for that last $10,000 was a trip away together. My husband’s family owns a house in South Carolina. I knew it would motivate us if we could arrange to go there at the end of the year, just the two of us, if we paid all of our debt off.
You Can Do This Too!
There is something thrilling about working together on something big. It connected Aaron and I in deep ways.
You might be thinking you can’t do this. “It worked for them, but I’ve got XYZ in my way.” I’m here to tell you that the impossible is possible. I share this story so that you know you can do it too. Wherever you are at start digging! Fight, work and claw your way out. YOU CAN DO THIS.
This is a journey that changed me. It changed my marriage and my family. Really, it’s changed the trajectory of our future and the legacy we will leave to future generations.
Now with the debt gone, I feel completely different. I have empty spaces in my mind where I can dream and think again that were clogged with worry and frustration. Right now, we are saving up our 3-6 months emergency fund. After that, Aaron and I are excited to have the freedom to dream of our future together. At some point we will definitely go to Montana!
Until Next Time,
Brooke