About Us

Hi! Thanks for stopping by!

My name is Cindy and my husband is Jimmy. Jimmy works in IT and I am a stay at home mom. We have two gorgeous girls, Lily, who is 6 and starting first grade in the fall, and Grace, who is 3. We are your average family with a home in the suburbs (of New York City) and $97,000 in debt. Yes, you read that right. We are sickened as well. Foolishness, isn’t it?

Last week, a friend of mine was singing the praises of Dave Ramsey and his Total Money Makeover book and Peace University course. So, I took the book out from my local library. Jimmy handles the bills, so I knew we were struggling, but I didn’t know how much.

After I read a few chapters, I told Jimmy “Why don’t we sit down tonight and make a budget?” He agreed wholeheartedly. So, we put a movie on for the kids and sat down in our dining room armed with bills and our laptop.

Jimmy opened the most recent credit card bill. $10,000. Ouch. He only makes around $6,000 a month. And we still have our mortgage and taxes to pay, which is almost $3,000 a month.

How did we get in this mess? I’ll tell you. Six years ago, I went from a job where I was making $70,000 a year to a job as a stay at home mom. I am not stupid – I know how to balance a checkbook. Our finances were great then – we had no credit card debt, a decent stash in savings, healthy 401(k)s and even two rental investment properties! Enter the real estate collapse- we were forced to sell our investment properties and ended up with nothing. We had to stop contributing to our retirement accounts just so we could make the monthly bills. We were a dual income household that switched to a one income household, but didn’t change our spending enough.

It didn’t help that Jimmy’s employer cut everyone’s salary earlier this year by 25%. Or that our health insurance premiums have risen dramatically- oh and our insurance is actually worse. Our copays are through the roof! And admittedly, some of it (a lot) was my fault – I mentally checked out of all things money related. On bill night (the night Jimmy stayed up to pay our bills online), Jimmy would freak out and mention that we didn’t have enough money and so we had to use the home equity line of credit to pay off the balance of our bills. We always knew that one day when our youngest was in school, that I would go back to work, and figured we would just pay it all off then. We had known that our debt would climb a little bit, but were prepared for that- in our minds, that was the cost of having a parent at home with our babies. But, last Tuesday night, we finally admitted that the situation is so dire that we can’t wait another 3 years until Grace starts full day school.

Enter the Debt Reduction PLAN.

We like Dave Ramsey, we really do. But he is just too extremist for us. We can’t cut up our credit cards- sorry. There are things you just NEED them for. But, we like his envelope system. Also, reading his book and listening to his radio program is very motivating.

So, what’s the plan?

We owe $97,000. We put all of our debt onto our low 3% home equity line of credit. We will NOT be accumulating any more debt, so that number will NEVER climb.

We’ve agreed to sit down every month and create a new budget based on that month’s expenses.

Our goal is to pay $1,000 toward our debt every month. At that rate, it’s $12,000 a year. We get $8,000 back in taxes from Uncle Sam every year and plan to put every DIME of that towards our debt (sorry Jimmy, no new huge tv). So, that means that we are aiming to pay down $20,000 every year, so it will take us roughly 5 years to become entirely debt free. Excuse me while I go vomit. I am sick, literally sick. But it took us 6 years to create this mess, it will take the same time to climb out of it.

We are trying to look at this new debt reduction plan as a fun hobby that we have in common. Nope, it’s not as fun as golf or tennis, but it’s necessary and we may as well try and have some fun if we have to do it.

So, come back and visit! I’ll be posting about my shopping adventures with my envelopes lol! Or about any deals that I have come across. I’ll also be talking about the challenges and the unexpected. Please post any comments you might have, along with any tips you think would help us. Only positive please, no bashing. We are sick enough already of the mess we are in. Help me make being on a budget fun!