WE'RE DEBT FREEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Me. Making my FINAL student loan payment... and our last ever debt payment outside of our house.
You should feel the mood in this house right now. WE'RE DEBT FREE! Our kids are just as excited as we are! Okay, almost as excited!

Rob, preparing the accounts to make our last payment. Right now Rob is throwing Titus in the air screaming "WE'RE DEBT FREE!"

Did I mention, "WE'RE DEBT FREE!"


Our Debt Free Story:

In early 2009 we began learning about the basic Dave Ramsey baby steps. The steps made a lot of sense to us, but we didn't have a lot of wiggle room in our budget. Our first calculations last Winter indicated we would be out of debt sometime in 2013.

Then the gazelle-like intensity began. We socked $1,000 in our emergency fund (baby step 1). Then with our tax returns from last year we knocked out a couple of our smaller medical debts and started our first extra payments on Rob's student loans (baby step 2). We put the payments we were paying toward the medical debts and any extra money we could scrape up into his loans each month too.

In September we paid off his loans and rolled ALL of that money into my student loans. We re-worked our budget to scrape out more money to add to our snowball each month. We sold more stuff and added that too. We didn't buy anything we didn't need and we stuck to our budget like glue.

 When Rob got a raise this year along with his new job, we just pretended he didn't get one and socked all that money into my loans also. We sold some more stuff, got a tax return, made a final payment on my loans as soon as that money landed in our account and viola, we've paid off $25,000 in 14 months. WE'RE DEBT FREE!