Update for the New Year!!

It has been several months since I have written an update for our Total Money Makeover Challenge, sorry! Life has been busy since Ryan started school and I have been working to get a MOMS Club chapter started in Midland. With today being the first day of 2011, I figured there was no better time to fill you in on the last few months...

...We have been sticking to our monthly budget and we pay cash for everything but our bills!! We sit down on the first of every month, write it all out, allocate our money to each category, and then put our plan into action. Now of course we've had a few unexpected things come up that we hadn't budgeted for...we've had a few doctor visits, extra things needed for Ryan at school, etc. However after tweaking our budget a little we've been able to make it all work without putting ourselves into more debt. (Which I must say isn't easy when you know how easily you could just get a loan or borrow money.)

...We've put $1000 into savings which means we have officially completed Baby Step One! (See my earlier post for more info on how we got this started.)

...We are now working on Baby Step Two! (I'll have a post about this next!)

So we are still on track with our Total Money Makeover!! Actually Jason and I ran some numbers yesterday and realized we could be debt free (except for our house in Farmington but we hope to sell it this spring) by January 2013!!

Now some may think that date seems really far off, for us that means we have two years to pay off all of the debt we've accumulated in 7 1/2 years. We realized that if we meet our goal of Jan. 2013, at that time we will have been in debt for 10 years!! That is 10 years too long!!

Seeing this goal date to being debt free has made us really "gazelle intense" about saving every dollar we can to put towards being debt free! Our goal is to meet that January 2013 debt free date but we are really challenging ourselves to push that date up as much as we can!! This has given me some personal challenges...I am going to start selling our left over yard sale items on craigslist/local baby sale/as well as holding another yard sale AND pushing myself to save more on groceries using coupons w/sales.

Now it's time to put our plan and goal into action!