And for us, what a very new year it is. New house, new town, new beginning. None of this is quite as new or quite as exciting as us starting this new year DEBT FREE!
That’s right, we are rolling into 2021 without student loans, without car payments, without any other consumer debt. This is very new. So new, we have never experienced this ever before…ever. Our first New Year together as a married couple, we were already up to our eyeballs in student loans and car payments, and every year after that seemed to carry more debt with it than the year before. We never questioned what we were doing or when or how we would ever pay it all off.
We never had a plan until February 2020.
There were so many things we wanted to do, so much more in life we wanted to experience, but every time we put pen to paper, the monthly payments held us back from living life the way we wanted to live it. That’s when we started having our weekly budget meetings and really getting serious about digging our way out of debt.
We learned we had to communicate about our finances, we had to look at the ugly mess we were in, and we had to be on the same page and work together. We figured out in February of 2020 that if we were to make a strict plan and stick to it, we could be debt free in about two years. At this particular budget meeting, we were at a local pub, we were drinking only water as to not spend money, and we enacted a plan that would get us where we wanted to be…eventually.
We worked and worked from that day forward. Our hard work paid off in big ways and we were able to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We learned to tell our money where to go. We learned to spend less, to cut costs, and to refurbish and repurpose.
We worked and worked, but the harder we worked, the more we realized we were holding on tightly to things we didn’t want…to a life we had never dreamed of having.
That’s when we started to look for things we could let go…things we could unbind.
We realized we could let go of the second car, we could let go of the big house, we could let go of the new pool. We realized if we could just let go, we could pay everything off. Everything. Down to the last penny. And we could just start over.
It has been less than ten months since we set out on our two-year plan. We did let go of a car, a house, a pool, and everything else we had stockpiled in the suburbs. We traded in the mountain of debt for a dream life in the mountains.
Because of the sale of our house, we have now paid every debtor to whom we owed money. Moving forward, we only have a 15-year mortgage for our white house with the circle drive.
We have learned that by letting go, we have more than we could have ever imagined.
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