Blessing: A House all of our OWN

Today was a BIG day for us.  We bought and paid for a house.  The bank does not own it.  It's ours.  The closing took 5 minutes. We signed 2 papers as opposed to when we closed on our first house. With a mortgage, you sign (what seemed like) millions of papers.

We are elated.  We have worked hard, made sacrifices and lived below our means for years....all for a moment like this!  THANK YOU God....and Dave Ramsey, of course!

The Cashier's Check we used to pay for our HOUSE.  In the amount of $78,167.00.

This house is not our dream house.  In fact, we have countless projects lined up to do in the next few months.  But, there is something about owning a house and not owing a dime on it.  The peace associated with not owning a dime on it is amazing.  We hope to help other couples learn to do the same thing when we host our first Financial Peace University class this fall. 

Here are a few "before" pictures of the house.  I can't wait to start our projects and share all of the before and after pictures.  Most of my inspiration comes from 2 of my favorite blogs, the famous http://www.younghouselove.com/ and my friend Jenna's Blog, http://domestic-engineer.com/     Ready.....set.....GO!

Living Room other Side

Living Room

Dining Room

Dining Room

Soon-to-be-remodeled-kitchen

Mud Room (love the space!)

More mud room

Entry Hall--Can't wait to get rid of this blue!

Front Entry

Stairway

Alexis' Room--next up after kitchen

Austin's Room

Austin's Room

The Master (BLUE ROOM!)  Bye Bye Blue!

Master other side

Master Closet #1

Master Closet #2

Our Home

Finally, A house of our own in Newell!

Frugal Tuesday Tip: Free Menu Planning Tool

One of the ways I save money is to plan a menu so I know what I want to get at the store instead of wandering and grabbing whatever looks good.  A lot of times, I base my menu off of the weekly loss leaders at the store (items they sell at or just above cost to get you in).  For example, Chicken and broccoli were on sale a couple of weeks ago so most of our meals had chicken and broccoli in them. 

When planning a menu, I get a lot of my recipe ideas off of the internet.  Either at Pinterest, other blogs, allrecipes.com, etc.  There is a sweet FREE tool out on the internet to get all of your planning in one place.

Say MMM .com is a free menu planning tool that lets you link recipes to your daily plans.  The very sweet thing about the free tool is that after you link a recipe, a pop up menu comes up with all of the ingredients in that recipe, allowing you to make a shopping list off of your weekly recipes. 

2 of my favorite things; technology and FREE, all in one place.  Score!  Happy menu planning!

Frugal Tuesday Tip: My Fitness Pal

It seems like a ton of people are on Weight Watchers these days.  I know Weight Watchers is a good program and I know it works.  My sister has lost over 20 pounds on it in 8 weeks (great job sis!!).  I almost thought about joining Weight Watchers when I saw that she has a super sweet App on her phone that tracks all of her "points".  She can scan a product and it will tell her how many points each serving is.  However, the nearest Weight Watchers meeting is 20 minutes away so that alone deters me from wanting to do it.  Not to mention it's about $10 a week.   I figure it would cost me about $60+ a month to do Weight Watchers plus my time driving there and back each week.  I am looking to lose some weight but I'm not interested in an extra monthly expense or time drainer.

Good news.....I have found a frugal alternative.  :)

 It's called My Fitness Pal.   Top 5 Perks of My Fitness Pal include:

1. It is FREE.
2. You can log your food and exercise.
3. You can connect via the web or your phone.
4. The phone app has a SCANNER!!  (Let's you scan your food and enters it for you)
5. You can connect with friends to motivate each other.

I was so excited to find this gem.  I used it about a year ago for a short amount of time but at the time you could only log on using a computer.  I am super excited to be able to track my food and exercise on my phone now because it's quick and can be done anywhere.  If you are in the market to lose some weight, check out My Fitness Pal!

Frugal Tuesday Tip: Pay Cash, Avoid Interest

I'm home with a sick baby (who is snuggling up next to me) today so I'm going to link up to Frugal Tuesday Tip @ Learning the Frugal Life.

This week my tip is to avoid the high cost of paying interest.   When we took Financial Peace University, one of the things we learned was that in order to become financially independent,  you can't be making payments to a bank all of your life.

As it tells us in God's life handbook...the borrower is slave to the lender: Proverbs 22:7. 

Following dumping all of our credit cards, our family became passionate about paying off all of our debt.

At the time, we were paying 6.7% interest on Justin's Honda Accord making monthly payments.  We sold the car, got rid of the payment and paid cash for a sweet....2002 Chrysler Town and Country. 

Pretty sweet, huh?  Especially when you are age 27.  :)  Was it glamorous?  Nope!  Did our friends make fun of us?  Yup!  But--it was a car we could pay cash for at the time.

Instead of making the monthly $300+ car payments (much of which was interest), we started socking that amount away in a savings account.  Month after month, we were paying ourselves instead of the bank.  This method has allowed us to pay cash for 3 other vehicles since the van (not brand new) AND been pivotal in allowing us to pay cash for a house, eliminating even another monthly payment.

So, if you are paying outrageous monthly interest on a car (or anything) that's depreciating anyway, don't do it.  Sell it, downsize and start paying YOURSELF that amount each month!

Blessing: A House

It's official...we purchased our 2nd home.  The inspection cleared and we are set to close at the end of March.  It's been a roller coaster of emotion because we were (and are) kind of unsettled about what we wanted to do with our living situation. But, the trailer we are living in sold and there is NOTHING else to rent in this town.

 

Before I talk about our new purchase, I want to give a little background...

Rewind 8 years.  Two weeks before our wedding in 2003, we purchased a very nice, large home in Clive.  I LOVE my house in Clive.  There really wasn't one thing about it I would change.  It has a very open floor plan, an amazing kitchen, double fireplace, huge closets, great location and the list goes on.  However, along with that large, beautiful house came a large, not-so-beautiful mortgage payment.  I was totally willing to make large mortgage payments to have a nice house early in our marriage. However,  the unexpected premature birth of Alexis and all of the financial burden that came along with that often times made it very hard to have any money at the end of the month.  We were "house-poor" as some would say.  It was a stressful few years early in our marriage, mostly because of financial burden.

Fast forward 7 years.  We re-locate to Newell.  We decide it would be smart to rent rather than buy so we rent the only 3 bedroom place available (to rent) in town.  Let's just say it's a far cry from our beautiful estate in Clive.  I don't love many things about this house but the one thing I do love is it allows us so much flexibility with our monthly budget.

You see, our trailer is only $450 a month to rent, which went up from the $400 it was our first year here. That is less than 1/3 of the cost of our Clive mortgage payment.  So, while it was not by choice that we landed here in our trailer, it has been a blessing in many, many ways.

We've gotten so used to the flexibility in our budget, which has allowed us to get even more serious about our FPU 7 Baby Steps that we decided to buy an "in the budget" house.  Instead of building a new, expensive house here or moving back to our expensive house in Clive, we've purchased.....a 2100 squarefoot house..........with............CASH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(***Side note: We so debated professing that to the world because to some people, finances are somewhat private and while we were keeping the fact we paid cash for an $80,000 house on the DL, we decided why?  We shouldn't apologize for living a very disciplined lifestyle and SHOULD be excited about this amazing journey.  We hope to help others learn to live a disciplined lifestyle so they, too, can be financially free someday!!)

While our new house is not my dream house, my dreams of becoming financially independent at an early age are coming true.  We will not have a rent or mortgage payment.  (At least not one that we're paying with our own  money, anyway.  We do still own our Clive house but we've rented that out so the rent there is covering our mortgage).  It will feel so good to not owe anyone a dime.  It will free up money in our budget to do things like:

• Give more generously
• Save $ to send our kids to college
• Save for our dream house :)
• Vacation
• Have more fun and less stress!!!

God has truly given me a passion to live a frugal lifestyle. Justin is becoming more and more frugal by the day and I love it.  We are excited to be able to live below our means for a few years to help our dreams, and the dreams of many others come true.

Stay tuned for more details on our new purchase.  I'll get pictures up soon.

 

Blessing: Financial Peace University

One of the biggest blessings to us as a couple has been Financial Peace University (FPU) by Dave Ramsey.  If you haven't taken the class before, I strongly suggest you do.  There are classes all over the country. 


A brief time-line leading up to our FPU journey:

• 2003; Graduated college in May, Justin started his first "big boy" job in June, purchased a house in July, married in August, I started teaching in August.
• 2004; Find out we are pregnant with Alexis in April and deliver her (3 months early) in September.  
• 2005; Justin loses his job in January and we bring Alexis home from the hospital in February. 
• 2006; We are in a financial tailspin, barely scraping by and putting things like Alexis' monthly perscriptions on credit cards.  Started FPU in September.

Dave Ramsey teaches seven baby steps to financial freedom.  Here they are:

• Baby Step 1 – $1,000 to start an Emergency Fund
• Baby Step 2 – Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball
• Baby Step 3 – 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings
• Baby Step 4 – Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement
• Baby Step 5 - College funding for children
• Baby Step 6 – Pay off home early
• Baby Step 7 – Build wealth and give!

We dove head first into FPU.  During our first year we....

1. Saved $1,000 emergency fund. 
2. Downsized cars to eliminate payments.
3. Paid off $18,000 in credit cards.

We were truckin' right along and on track to start our 3-6 month emergency fund when Justin lost his job in October of '07.  There goes the $1,000 emergency fund and we had JUST cut up all of our credit cards.  Yikes.  More stressful times.

Thanks to a recommendation from a great friend, Justin got a new job in January of '08 and we were back on track.

FPU Timeline from '08 to current...

1. Saved the $1000 emergency fund again.
2. Paid cash for Amy to get her Master's degree .
3. Decided Justin would go back to school for his Master's degree.
4. Start our 3-6 month expenses in savings.
5. Move to Newell, rent out our Clive house.
6. Finish and exceede our 3-6 month in savings.
7. Decide instead of invest in Roth IRA's to hold off and save $$ to buy another house to avoid 2 mortgages.
8. Purchase a house in Newell.

Since taking Financial Peace University in 2006, we have been passionate about living like no-one else, so we can live like no-one else.  Dave Ramsey taught us so many great foundational things that quite honestly saved our marriage.  Financially, we were going down a very wrong path.  We hope to someday have the opportunity to help others learn what we have learned.  It is life changing!

Blessing: 2 healthy years!

Our little Austin turned 2 on Friday.  He has been such a blessing in our lives and brought much more joy than we ever thought possible.  His first 2 years have been much different than Alexis' first two.  It's amazing to see all of the growing and changing a typical 2 year old does.  Things Alexis didn't do until much later.  We are mostly thankful that he has been extremely healthy in his first 2 years of live.  We pray for the health of our kids often because know how much life can be a bummer when they aren't healthy.  Austin, thanks for being such a blessing to us.  We love you to the moon and back!

Here are a few highlights of his birthday party from the weekend.

 We had a baseball theme

 He is such a happy little boy!

 Blowing out my 2 candles!

 As expected, he loved the cake but love the "ice ceam" even more! :)