About

 

Hi! Glad you stopped by 🙂 and it seems you want to know a little more about me. Well, I’m a coffee lover, NASCAR enthusiast, slow runner, terrible vegan, and above all else, Christian. Full-time employee, wife and mother of two young girls and two really old dogs, filled with wanderlust, and consumed by debt.

About the debt: it’s basically all student loan debt. As of starting this blog, we have no credit cards. We recently purchased a new vehicle with a loan, but my in-laws have pledged the payments for at least two years (sweet folks who knew we needed new vehicle when one ceased to be driveable). The student loan debt is overwhelmingly my husband’s, but I often blog as an”I” not a “we”, because this is my blog, not because we aren’t a financial team.

While I am the top earner, we’d both like very much for me to be a stay-at-home mom, and it would be more than doable on my husband’s income – if we didn’t have those student loan payments. Essentially, I work to pay for student loans and daycare and nothing seems to be left over at the end of the month for us to get ahead. I get really irritated by articles that say I can just stay home if I don’t have to pay for daycare. Think of the tax savings and cutting out work lunches and gas savings, they say. Tax savings is fair, but I don’t do work lunches – I can’t afford them – and I commute with my husband, so we are paying the gas no matter what. Plus there’s this fun fact: our student loan payments are 50% more than our modest mortgage. We are essentially paying two house payments!

So what should you expect from this blog? Well, from what I’ve read, bloggers are supposed to find a topic they are an expert at and blog away. Clearly I am only an expert at being in debt, so that’s what I write about. Sort of “do as I say, not as I do”. If my mistakes can help others, maybe they were worth it. Or I can tell myself that, anyway 😉

With over $100k in student loan debt (plus a mortgage), this is definitely not a how-to blog. It won’t be a blog about how we paid off our debt in just one year or how to budget or coupon. I’m going to learn a few things and fail a few times and you get to read about it all. Probably with hefty doses of sarcasm. And hopefully with some introspectives on how our financial life relates to our Christian walk.

And why did I start blogging now? Well, we had our second child and I knew things were never going to magically get easier for us financially. We’ve been getting by because of generous family, but looking at my innocent daughter – whom I pass off to strangers five days a week – I realized this isn’t the life I want. I’m tired of getting by. Of missing out on these early years. It’s time to do something about it. And you, dear reader, can hold me accountable.

Disclaimer: I am just a person in debt. I have no financial training. Talk to a professional to help you sort out your finances.