Living Debt Free Pt. 2

So hubby and I decided to get married. We went off to Sedona, Arizona and had a very private ceremony. Then we traveled around the Southwest seeing the sites. When we got back home and was completely moved in and free of my apartment, we had the "discussion" about my debts. I had been paying minimums on my loans since they were automatically deducted from my paycheck. It was the credit card debt that I was so so embarrassed to share. It wasn't super outrageous. I had roughly $6000 in credit card debt, plus my car loan and the furniture/debt consolidation loan. I can't remember exactly how much I owed on the loans.

Without even know what we were doing, we started paying things off. After all we were DINK's now (Double Income, No Kids. We were really starting to make a dent in things. I can't remember the EXACT order of things... Mommy brain and all. lol

My hubby listens to a lot of talk radio. He started listening to Dave Ramsey's show on the radio. He insisted we sit down and figure out a budget, then make some envelopes for each budget item and put cash into them from each paycheck. We quickly paid off all the credit card debt and my loans. We were left with just our mortgage. During this time, I was laid off. Big bummer. I was happy to be without the headache of my job, but oh so disappointed that it would take us that much longer to pay off the mortgage. Especially since we had agreed that we would pay it off completely before moving... so glad we didn't also agree to waiting on kids til then.

I was never able to find a job... this was back in 2001. I didn't really want a job and just wanted a break from working. I looked and didn't really find anything. Shortly after being pink slipped, we found ourselves unexpectedly pregnant. Talk about a game changer. Well, I ended up losing the baby. It got us thinking though about purposefully starting a family. We upgraded the cavalier to a camry. We ended up taking out a home equity line of credit to pay for it. So that pushed the mortgage up. Which also meant it would take longer to pay off the mortgage. BTW our mortgage was about $55,000 at that time on a starter house.

I'll pick up Pt. 3 with the next chapter of our life... KIDS! And how we had to adjust to one income with an increasing family size.