Financial Peace... Do you have it?

Those of you who know Bret and I well, know that financial freedom is an important thing in our life. We have worked very hard to get to where we are and made sacrifices along the way. For those who do not know us well, let me tell you a little bit about us and our road to financial peace. If you want to skip the story, that is okay, but please read my next blog post.

Neither one of us were privileged growing up, we saw our parents struggle and I think we took away from that the desire be different. We both attended college. Although I did not know what I wanted to do and my parents nor I had the ability to pay for it, I took out student loans to go. I did stay at home with my parents, worked through college, and tried to minimize every expense that I could because I knew I would have to pay for it all eventually. I did not party in college, I took it seriously because I knew that I would have to pay for it and I didn't want to waste my money and also because I knew it was an opportunity to make a better life for myself. In fact I have worked from the time I was 15 years old. I wanted a job as soon as I turned 15 because I wanted to buy some things for myself, to lessen the burden on my parents. In my whole life until college my parents never owned a home. They owned one when my sister was little and had to file bankruptcy and was never able to afford one until I was in college.

I graduated and was able to find a job that paid more than either one of my parents ever made in their lifetime of working. For a brief moment when I didn't know if I had a job out of college I thought about going back for a Finance degree, funny how now Finances surround me in every position that I hold. I moved to Nashville away from my parents, rented an apartment and started working. I bought a car after several months of working because I was borrowing my Mom's during this time.

I hated wasting my money living in an apartment, well that dreaded Y2K helped me to get out of that apartment. The Y2K bonus that was common in the IT field allowed me to have closing cost and down payment on our home. I had just started dating Bret shortly before buying my house. He also owned a house in Murfreesboro.

I came into the relationship with debt and he had none beside his car and house. I still had my student loans, car, a credit card, and now a home. Not too bad, but certainly not where I wanted to be. Before we got married we decided since we were both able to make it on our own before we were married, once we were married we would take one of our incomes to do nothing but pay off debt. We paid my entire income toward our one home. We paid off the student loans, applied that extra money toward the credit card, payed that off, and then payed more toward the mortgage. We decided to never again carry over a balance on a credit card. We still have them for internet purchases and vacations, but we ALWAYS pay them off. We paid of my house in just 7 years! It would have been so easy to blow money, on new cars, new stuff for the house, electronics and vacations. But we chose not to.

You may ask then, why did you go and buy a bigger house? If I were only a stay at home mom, I assure you we would not have. I have a business, a growing business. It was starting to make money and the space in our home was not cutting it for the family and the business. The question came, do I lease a space, or do I keep in in our home? It did not make sense to us to throw money away on a lease, and we were not ready to make the big leap of purchasing a retail space. It also made more sense for our family to keep it in our home. My business pays for the extra space that we have. We applied all of the $ from the sale of the other home to this one.

We have been a little bit lax with $ lately and are trying to get back into saving more. We have an emergency fund and invest all that we can in retirement and Kyndal's college and we tithe to our church. We love vacations though and we are sacrificing buying things for the house to save for our much needed vacations.

So why am I writing all of this? Well because I hate to see people struggle. I want everyone to have financial peace. I know something that can help you...that is if you want help. Help in all things, reducing debt... saving...investing and more. Please read my next blog post and I will share with you how we did it and you can too.