Every debt free journey has a beginning. Below is ours, from my perspective.
I should mention that I started this timeline three years before Mr. Lincoln and I married, because I felt that it was important to mention where the mortgage came into play.
So without further ado…
Our Pre-Debt-Free Journey
2010 – SUMMER – Move to a new town and start a new job.
2011 – WINTER – Leave former job; start new job. Buy a house and put a good chunk down using some savings I had. Meet Mr. Lincoln at new job and become BFFs.
2012 – WINTER – Decide that Mr. Lincoln is pretty cute and start dating him. Money comes up in the conversation. Like me, he is not a high-earner. The discovery is made that he has some debt including school loans and credit cards, etc. He owns a house at this point, too.
2013 – SUMMER – Mr. Lincoln proposes with my grandma’s ring, which was beautiful (and saved us a ton of money)! Wedding is set for a Friday night in the fall. Mr. Lincoln and his daughters begin relocating their gear to my house so he can list his for sale. I use some extra money I have in savings to pay his credit card off (around $2-3,000 – can’t recall exact figure).
2013 – FALL – Marry Mr. Lincoln. Have awesome time. Honeymoon in Aruba. Smooch a lot.
2013/14 – WINTER – First Christmas as a family. Go overboard. Spend a ridiculous amount of money on the kids. I think I was overexcited about finally having a family of my own and our bank account certainly showed it.
2014 – SUMMER – Starting to get annoyed seeing money spilling out of our bank account like water. Still waiting for Mr. Lincoln’s house to sell. Getting tired of paying two mortgages and two sets of utility bills.
2014 – FALL – Mr. Lincoln loses his job. The house sells soon after (finally!) School loans go into deferment. Minimums get paid on everything.
2014/15– WINTER – Buy snowboard equipment for four people with our tax return, instead of using it for other things. One of my biggest regrets is the terrible timing of this purchase.
2015 – SPRING – Mr. Lincoln lands a new job. I begin Googling how to save money and eventually come across Dave Ramsey, a name I had heard from my boss in my twenties. Can’t stop thinking about what Dave said about debt, but don’t do much about it. We resume paying the $6,000 or so left on the student loan. I decide to toss huge chunks at it to pay it down faster for the mere fact that I hate it, not because I have an actual plan yet.
2015 – SUMMER – Tell ourselves “we deserve it” and trade in my paid-off, fully-operable (yet rusty), 10-year-old vehicle for a used, high performance car that is nearly more than I make in a year; lock ourselves into payments for SIX YEARS. Another big regret.
2015/16 – WINTER – We see a financial planner to make sure we are doing everything we needed to financially. He tells us we aren’t doing that bad but need to invest more in retirement. I ask him what he thinks of Dave Ramsey and he seems unimpressed. This winter, we go snowboarding at least 3-4 times. (We thought we were being smart by waiting until 4pm on Sundays when the rates decrease. Yeah – um, no. Not going at all would’ve been the smartest move.)
2016 – SUMMER – Our rock bottom. The car payment is beginning to expose the cracks in our poor financial management system. The cushion in our bank account is starting to disappear. We begin to access the little we have in savings to pay bills. Decide that something needs to be done. Revisit Dave Ramsey videos. Decide that we need a zero-based budget. Sign up for YNAB (see my Resources page for more details).
Our Debt-Free Journey
(Everything But the House)
2016 – SUMMER – Pay off my husband’s cell phone using our savings. Start a zero-based budget using YNAB. Feels weird. Not sure what our budget categories should be. We just know that everything looks really scary because our outgo is clearly more than our income.
2016 – FALL – Starting to see progress. Checking account metrics look like a roller coaster on a steady climb. Feels good. Begin to cash flow virtually everything. Save if we need something and pay cash for it.
2016/17– WINTER – Official start of snowball. I write a check for $302.73 to pay off my cell phone using extra money we found in our bank account thanks to our new, zero-based budget! I take the amount I was paying on my phone and add it to the student loan payment. I pay this amount each month until I can’t stand it anymore.
2017 – SPRING – Get tired of student loan and pay off the remaining $1,845.32 using savings we had. Throw the snowball onto to the car loan payment (a.k.a. our most hated loan) plus anything extra we have left over at the end of the month. We refer to this as our “surplus”.
Also 2017 – SPRING – Fall off the budgeting wagon. Cash flow a 65″ TV during an extra paycheck month. Feel a strong twinge of regret. Beat ourselves up a bit knowing that money should’ve gone toward debt.
2017 – SUMMER – Continue car loan debt snowball. No big changes.
2017 – FALL – Continue car loan debt snowball. Again, no big changes.
2017/18 – WINTER – Snowball status unchanged. Join #DebtFreeCommunity on Instagram late in the season. Feel accepted and inspired!
2018 – SPRING – Continue snowball. Begin www.pinchinlincolns.com to form a greater connection with the Debt Free Community and to share our journey with others!
