Easy To Get - Much Harder To Get Rid Of

What I really want to blog about is Elijah and his big boy bed, but I can’t do that without pictures and I can’t give pictures until I actually get them off my camera. So I must be patient and wait until next weekend.
So my runner up topic of choice? (Why does that sentence look so odd to me?)

I don’t know. I could talk about “Nerd Night” at our house on Friday. Or about our awesome double date on Saturday. Or our awesome meal and continuation of Nerdness on Sunday. Or our random adventure in search of entertainment on Monday. But those all seem sort of boring to read about. I mean I try not to be a “here is what we did today” blogger. I typically don’t find our lives that interesting and I’m living in it.

So I think I will instead let you all in on my excitement for today.

We got our tax return! That does not mean we get to go buy a bunch of new shiney things. Although we are getting a new TV since ours is almost dead. If you have 3 kiddos in your house and try to get things done without those said kids destroying something then you know a TV is a good 30 minute distraction while you make dinner or clean another kid’s bottom. So the TV is the only shiney thing we are getting – for sake of our (but mostly Justin’s) sanity.

Getting our tax return to us means JUSTIN’S CAR IS PAID OFF! That means in the passed 5 years we have:
- Paid off my car loan
- Paid off 1 of Justin’s student loans
- Paid off Justin’s car loan
- No outstanding debt on Credit Cards
- That is $18,000 in debt (not including credit card debt)!!

YAY! We still have $9,000 to go, but if things go as I have planned (and they RARELY do since God's plan trumps my plan everytime) then by this time next year we’ll be debt free. That means, of course, we will continue to live on our insanely tight budget which means we don’t get to “do” a lot.  We'll still function on $300/month for food for 5 people.  We'll drive as little as possible to make the $200/month for gas for the cars last. But it will be worth it. Like Dave Ramsey says “you have to live like no one else (ie: don’t eat out a lot, don’t have cable, don’t see movies, don’t do…) so later we can live like no one else (ie: be debt free and DO things stress free and debt free!) To me, and my hubby, it’s well worth it. A few years of living “tight” so we won’t have to live “tight” for potentially the rest of our lives.

This does not mean we’ll be rolling in the money at all. I mean we’re living off of one income and our rent alone is half of that income. However, it does mean that we’ll have all of our “debt” money (roughly $200/month) free to do with what we please (this will probably include Greek food once a week and cable to start).

Paying off Justin’s car is a good reward for a long hard task we’ve been trying to accomplish. So we will tough out this last year (hopefully only one year) and I will look forward to my weekly dose of Gyro (Greek) and Psyche on USA (cable).