Saving Money Little by Little

So I realized the other day that, now that the hubs and I have sold our house, we are officially debt-free!

At age 29 and 26, with a one year old and a baby on the way, we are debt-free. Can you believe it?

We've had no other debt (aside from the mortgage) for a couple years now. Since we got married, we knew we wanted to live as debt-free as possible so we hunkered down and finished paying for school and inherited credit card debt from our pre-marriage days (sorry about that college fender-bender, babe).

There have been many things that have helped us get out of debt. One of the biggest being the generosity of both our parents before the hubs and I even met. Brad's parents covered his college tuition and the really expensive years of my college tuition were covered by my family (long story). Now, before you think that our debt-free-ness was simply handed to us, I'll say three things:

1) God is faithful. All the time.

...that one deserves repeating: God is faithful. All the time.

2) Debt is debt and any amount takes sacrifice to pay back. Whether you are $50, $500, $5,000 or $500,000 in debt, you have to make sacrificial choices to get out of debt and that should be applauded. If it were easy, the rest of America would be working to get out of debt too. But they aren't.

3) In addition to my left over college debt and (ahem) fender-bender debt, the house Brad owned before we were married did not sell for over a year into our marriage. Newlyweds with two mortgages. It was hard. And in fact, we ended up paying money in order to finally sell it, not making money.

So how did we do it? How did we become debt-free before the ripe old age of 30?

Come in close, I don't want to say this too loudly...

"We decided to live within our means."

Sounds kind of obvious doesn't it. Like almost dumb, it's so obvious. Now, I don't at all want to come across as prideful or insensitive. I know that there are many people working really hard to make it through the day, week or month. I also know that many unforeseen circumstances can happen in life that throw our financial plans off-course, like the loss of a job. Or a medical crisis. Or, as in our case, a house that just wouldn't sell (no matter how low we listed it).

But here's the thing: for the most part, barring no medical crisis', etc. have occurred, we don't wake up in debt. We put ourselves there.

Wowzer, that's an embarrassing statement to own up to, isn't it?

The choices we make - big, once-in-a-while choices and small, everyday choices - are what either put us in or keep us out of debt.

Now, this might seem kind of backwards to some but I'm just gonna say it: More times than not, I don't believe the size of your income has anything to do with whether or not you can get out of debt.

Why would I say that? Wouldn't you think that you'd be able to get out of debt faster if you had more money? Yes, technically that should be true but the ratio of income to debt is relatively the same. As in, the more money you make, the greater odds that you have even more debt. So it really doesn't come down to how much money you make. It comes down to how you spend the money you make.

Brad and I didn't win the lottery and we didn't do any crazy get-rich-quick plans. We simply made choices to live within our means everyday. Saving money little by little. And those days turned into weeks and those weeks turned into months. And, at the end of those months, we chose to spend the money we saved towards getting out of debt. And, guess what, it worked.

I have no intention of this blog becoming a "coupon blog" or "get-out-of-debt blog" or "make-everything-from-scratch blog". I just want to write about everyday life and if that involves something that I think can be helpful to others, I'll include it.

That being said, as the hubs and I do things and make choices that keep us out of debt, I'd love to blog about it. And every time I do, I'll entitle it "Saving Money Little by Little: #1, #2, #3...". It won't be a week-long series and I won't post about it every day. There won't be a particular order to the numbers and the numbers won't have any relation to the post's importance, they will only be there as a way to keep track of the posts. (UPDATE: You can find what's been posted so far by clicking here.) 

I'm no Dave Ramsey or Suzi Orman but I am human and I am out of debt which means there's no reason other people can't be too. If anything we did can help anyone else, it's worth writing about and that's what I'll do.

So here's to more of America becoming debt-free little by little.