Our Journey to Financial Freedom

Brent wrote this post last week, as we prepared to make the very last payment on his student loan. The payment cleared yesterday, so I am so happy to finally share our Journey to Freedom :)

Written by Brent:

If you are reading this, old lady Sallie Mae has finally left our home forever.  She was the last one hanging on and keeping us from our freedom.  Now we have officially paid off all of our debt except our house.  We struggled about whether or not we should tell our debt free story or keep it to ourselves.  We decided that we should be proud of our accomplishments, and we know reading the stories in The Total Money Makeover kept us motivated. Our lives are not perfect and there are many situations in our lives that can and should be better.   

We started our journey over four years ago, not really knowing why, but knowing we needed to get out of debt.  We started out with debt on an SUV, truck, land, student loan, and credit card.  We used the Dave Ramsey snowball method to attack this debt.  The first step to the process was getting on the same page and creating a budget.  As we slowly paid off debt in the beginning, we felt as if we were not making any progress.  Once we would get one thing paid off, we would add that payment to something else, and debt would melt away a little faster.   We made the most progress when we finally realized that brand new cars are not necessary, they are just modes of transportation.  We traded in or sold our cars, and we found used ones that get us from point A to point B. Adding the car payments to the debt snowball jump started paying off the debt a lot faster.  Just to make things interesting, we decided to throw in a couple of kids and a few surgeries to pay for along the way. 

As we paid off debt, our lives changed together.  We are closer as a couple than when we started this journey.  As we accomplished this task together, it helped us communicate more.  Because of this process, Laura has been able quit work and stay at home with the kids.  There are numerous blessings that come with her being at home with the kids. It also allowed us to grow spiritually and changed our lives forever.  When money, or worry about money, does not consume your life, it allows other areas of your life to grow. 

We talked about not knowing why we started the process, but we know now.  There is a little guy in South Korea that never would have had a chance to grow up with three brothers without us getting out of debt.  Dave Ramsey always talks about changing your family tree financially.  Little did we know that part of our family tree would be a branch from South Korea.  It will still be months or even a year before Lennox will come home, but we will be ready to go get him when the time comes.

We did not accomplish these things alone.  God has blessed us throughout this journey in many different ways. Family members have helped us out whether they knew it or not.  If you mysteriously stopped getting Christmas presents, you were a blessing to us.  If you received a gift, they will eventually be nicer gifts.  Thank you to everyone that has helped us out with fundraisers for the adoption.  Thanks to your help, we were also able to pay for all of our adoption fees during this time.  Thank you to everyone that has encouraged us through the adoption process.   Thanks again and we are ready to start the next step in our lives being debt free.