This morning I was looking through some old pictures, and the first word that came to mind was grateful. As I scrolled through my camera roll I looked at the babies that were born, the homes that were purchased, the degrees that were finished, the jobs that were started, the marriages that began, the bodies that were healed, the debt that has been eliminated, and the relationships that have been restored all as a result of prayer. I am amazed at all that God has done for not only me, but also those around me. As I also looked at those pictures I was reminded of the times before those highlighted pictures, and the process that it took to get there. I remember the tears, the stress, the wondering why me. Now I realize on the other side of some things that God had a purpose in each of those processes. One story that truly sticks out is the process of finding a new job. I hadn't had to look outside of my company for a new job in five years because I was blessed with new opportuniti...

     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...

Throughout the last 12 months I never would have imagined that we would be in and out of emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, hospitals, and doctors offices. We blew our entire flex spending account this year because of all of the medical expenses! We really just thought we would be getting some cool new designer glasses with the money, but that didn’t happen at all! So how did we get here...? The first time that we went to urgent care I slipped and fell I was in so much pain it even hurt to sit up. On top of that Eddie also had a cyst that was causing him pain, so off to urgent care we go. Lots of x-rays later we were thankful to learn that nothing was broken I was just badly bruised. Eddie just needed some antibiotics. Well this visit was right before Christmas and while he was taking the antibiotics we head to Columbus and he forgot them on the counter.  The cyst of course came back much bigger and more painful so we went to the emergency room for them to drain it. ...

On October 1st 2016 at around 3:00 pm we said our vows having no idea what life had in store for us. The next few posts will be about the real life wedding vows, and some of our experiences with a few of the phrases. First up for better or worse. At the end of our wedding day we were on cloud 9 floating out of our reception high off of love and the perfection of our wedding day. It was everything that we had dreamed of and more. All of the saving and sacrificing made the day so worth it! Then we went from our fabulous wedding to our wonderful honeymoon in the Dominican Republic. We swam with the dolphins went to an amazing spa where we were pampered for half a day, and it was so wonderful! We even won a dance off at one of the shows at the hard rock resort! We came back from our honeymoon like if life is going to be like this together we got this! After our honeymoon we went our separate ways for 4 days Eddie flew back to D.C. and I drove to Michigan. On October 13th I went to Chica...

One thing that many people that are not married assume is that marriage is this fairy tale where you come home kiss each other, cuddle, have delicious meals, sex all the time, and this over abundance of money because of your newly combined finances. That is not true. Maybe the first week or so is like that then reality hits. Here are 5 unsexy conversations that we had to have this year. Each of these all though not fun are important to our marriage surviving and thriving. Death- I know this one sounds so terrible to think about because you are so in love and your significant other is not going anywhere anytime soon. The reality is it's a possibility. We don't know what each day holds and preparing for death is something that we started talking about before our marriage. Everyone should have life insurance policies! They don't cost that much and it protects your family if something were to happen to you. We have term life policies through Northwest Mutual for now. We also...

As we are on the cusp of being married for one full year. I must say that we learned a few things about what it takes to make this marriage thing work forever. I am thankful that during our time of dating that we were able to read a few books together about relationships. I am also thankful that during my time of being single that I did a lot of reading up on marriage because those books really helped when it came time to actually execute what we learned from those hours invested in  reading up on marriage. The lessons below are a summation of what we have collectively learned in love. Through it all our relationship has grown more than we expected. We have been tested throughout this year in every way possible and the amazing thing is that it is really only the beginning of our journey together! The Love Lessons are as follows in no particular order:   Shut Up and Pray- I don’t know how many times we have both had to do that this year. I know that I’m a trip and ‘I...

My parents said that I couldn’t date until I turned 16. Shortly after my 16th birthday my dad and I went out on a "practice date." I remember it very clearly we went to the Cracker Barrel and my dad was going to teach me the things to look for while dating. So the date with dad begins. I get dressed up and he does too and we are off. He starts the night by opening my car door and the lessons begin. He said if the joker can’t open a car door for you then he ain’t the right one (Lesson 1). As we are driving to the Cracker Barrel my dad said always look at his gas tank some guys try to pull stuff. He should have at least a half tank of gas when you get in the car (Lesson 2). We get to the restaurant and my dad of course opens the door for me and we are seated for dinner. During this dinner my dad and I discuss boundaries and the rules that I would agree to follow as I started on this new milestone of dating. I realized discussing boundaries before the date ever b...