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Nov 21, 2019    |       21 comments

Sara’s Debt Story

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Hi! I’m Sara, the newest member of the Blogging Away Debt team. I’m excited to be here—not because I’m happy to be drowning in debt, but because I know the BAD community gives hope, tough love, and motivation to each other. You are my kind of people. Plus my family and friends can only listen to so much of my financial talk, so I’m grateful to have an outlet and a place to document our progress.

So what’s my story? I’m a writer and mom to three under 10, living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. I’m in my late 30s, and I love hiking, reading, gardening, and binge-watching Netflix while I do the dishes. Together my husband and I run a business that we love, sometimes hate, and has required a ton of loans.

Family of five walking on a grassy bluff above the ocean

Honestly, our business debts are getting paid off and they’re not the ones that worry me most. Even our $280,000 mortgage isn’t the scariest of our debts. We have no credit card debt. No car payments. No personal loans. So what overwhelms me most? Without a doubt it’s our beast of a student loan.

My husband’s career in healthcare required a serious and staggering investment in his education, and we just didn’t know how to succeed in his field without taking out loan after loan. We foolishly borrowed during his school years like it was Monopoly money.

Now we have a good, growing business, but we’ve made very little progress on our student loan. He graduated seven years ago with (gulp) $358,000 of student loans. Want to know how much is still hanging over our heads?

Table: student loans, unpaid principal $295,056.08, 4.3% rate, $2,302.49 monthly

Those numbers take my breath away! For years after school, we could only make income-based payments that barely paid off the interest. We lived frugally but with no set budget, and we just sort of assumed it’d eventually get paid off somehow. We were in denial that at the rate we were going, we’d be paying for this loan until the end of time.

About three years ago, I stumbled upon “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey. For the first time I saw our situation clearly, and instead of panicking, I saw there was a plan. Baby steps. A way out. Hope! I saw that our debt could actually be paid off.?? My husband, on the other hand, didn’t really catch the vision until this summer. And even though we still disagree sometimes on what course to take, we’re finally making a dent.

Here’s what’s worked for us so far:
– Refinancing our student loan: we changed from My Great Lakes to Earnest in September, dropping our rate from 7.2% to 4.55% (hallelujah!)
– Budgeting with the free Every Dollar App: we can be sloppy sometimes, but we’re still more aware of our spending than we’ve ever been
– Picking up side hustles: this week alone we’ve each taken on a new side job, and we plan to put that money towards our loan

It’s a start. I look forward to the day when I can breathe easier and declare us debt-free, but in the mean time I’m going to share our ups and our downs, our good choices and our stupid mistakes. I’m thankful for this community and the chance to learn from each other.

Here we go!

Anybody else out there owe more on their student loans than their mortgage? Any advice on how to carve away at such a colossal debt?

Nov 20, 2019    |       4 comments

A Week of Cooking for the Family

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As always, when I visit my family this coming week, I will be cooking. And not just cooking for my two kids, but also my parents, my 4 siblings and possibly an assortment of their friends and significant others. I don’t mind it. Truly.

But it’s definitely not a relaxing vacation week. The flip side is that my dad pays for all the groceries and all our entertainment and a few meals out. So I get to visit some of my favorite restaurants from my childhood and college days.

Cutting board with sliced apples, carrots, cucumber, and herbs

In all these years I’ve been writing here…the roller coaster of life we’ve been on, I have learned that controlling my food is more than 1/2 of the battle when it comes to controlling my spending. And as a result, I big part of my debt journey.

Lessons in Food Spending

Not eating out, not stopping for snacks, not splurging on unnecessary groceries…

These are all HUGE factors in my daily money battle. Making wise decisions every day.

  • We learned that giving ourselves some entertainment money to blow how we want, provides the needed limits on eating  out spending while not making us feel deprived.
  • Compiling a list of snacks that were healthy and safe to keep in the car curbed our stops for snacks when we had long days in the car or a child was “starving” when I picked them up.
  • Meal plan, meal plan, meal plan – we get to eat what we want and everyone gets a say and shares the responsibility.

As the kids have gotten busier, they are cooking less for the families. But I am enjoying the nights at home.

It’s our grocery budget that I expect to change the most in the new year…

  • History Buff is going to be working full time and going to school part time. He rarely eats at home other than leftovers.
  • Princess will most likely have a job come the new year. And while she does eat dinner at home most nights, she does not eat a lot.

I’ve started looking at recipes for smaller families. It’s been hard for me. I’ve over-cooked way too often in the last few months…too much potato salad, too much chicken salad, too much pasta salad. Used to be all the food would be gone…now I’m throwing more and more food away.

I guess this is the first big change in going from a big family to a small one…and I’m on the cusp of being an empty-nester. Well at least a mom with only super responsible and/or adult children at home. It feels weird. But I know it’s just the first big change with many more on the horizon as Princess will start driving in the new year and much more.

 

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