I have known about FPU since my senior year of college. Sister Marla gave me "The Total Money Makeover" in 2012. I attended some of the classes, and I kind of tossed the book to the side until last year... Last year I was scared. Last year I questioned why I went back to school. Then on August 20th I saw an Instagram/ Facebook post from my friend Kamille that changed my life. She talked about how she and her husband were paying off their student loans... What?! I thought we die with these. So I reached out to her and she began to share their testimony. As we started our journey they became debt free and seeing them made me realize that this is a possibility for us too. I asked Eddie what he thought about us ordering FPU, and he was on board. We ordered FPU the following week and decided that Monday nights at 8:00pm for the next 9 weeks we would make it a date to watch the videos and fill out our workbook. Every week we were learning more and more information, and the discus...

     In 2018 although we have huge financial goals, and we will hit them! We also have some things that we are going to spend some money on because they are important to our personal growth, development, and well being. We believe that investing in yourself, your marriage, your family, and your friends are some of the greatest investments that you can make. Every year you should set aside some money in your budget to make those investments. Below is a list of some of the investments that we are making in 2018... 1. Our spiritual growth and development. This year we plan to invest money in both of our spiritual development through conferences and books. We both put on our vision boards this year that we wanted to grow in our individual walks with God, so we knew that putting money aside for these events and books was really important to that overall 2018 goal. Throughout the year we will also continue to find other events at our church and other churches that will assis...

     Yes we are saving money, and in the last post I gave you our huge debt payoff goals for 2018, but one thing that is really important to us is putting aside time and money for dates!          Just to give you all an idea of our weekly budget for dates while we are paying off debt; we put in a line item of $80 per week to spend for our entertainment. Most weeks we don't even use half of this money, but it is there for us to enjoy one another during this journey to being debt free. Here are some ways that we are stretching our weekly date night dollars. 1. If people ever ask you all what you want for a gift ask for restaurant gift cards! We have gone on so many dates with these gift cards. We got several as wedding presents that came in handy during our first year of marriage. We also got a few as Christmas and birthday presents. We use these throughout the year for those nights that we don't want to cook, or we just want to connect with one...

      Now that we are well into 2018. I am beyond excited to see how far we have come financially. In 2017 we paid off over $20,000 of debt, and we now have under six figures of debt. We started our debt free journey last year not because we had bad credit, or because we were struggling financially. We just wanted more for our lives and for our future.  I always told Eddie that we would be young millionaires, but how that was going to happen I wasn't exactly sure. At the beginning of 2017 we thought we were doing so well with paying off debt. In the first 9 months of the year we paid off  about $8,200. This came from medical debt, and some credit card debt.      After we began Financial Peace University in October we were able to pay off over $10,000 in debt in just 3 months. A large portion of this $10,000 was my car loan. I can not begin to describe how good it feels to no longer have consumer debt, medical debt, or car debt. We are down to onl...

      When I said this part of the vows I was thinking to myself let's not ever have poorer times. Now we are definitely nowhere close to poverty, but we have learned a lot about money management this year. Combining our finances was actually a pretty easy experience I will say that when I signed up to have my check directly deposited into OUR account, and not my own I did feel this sense of the walls closing in on me. I had this feeling mostly because this marriage thing was really real, and I no longer could hide what I was doing financially. I was now accountable to someone else. In the beginning we tithed 10% of our income to our church, paid bills, purchased flights, and vacations out of our joint account. We didn't really have a plan to pay down our debt. Throughout the first year we paid all of our bills, and paid off our wedding rings, furniture, and some other debts including all of our medical bills. Then after graduating with my masters I got the email of how m...