Hello, and welcome to Saving Sanely!
My name is Stacey and I am here to share my journey with you about going from being a hopeless spender, up to my eyeballs in debt to a recovering saver: debt-free, more organized and living my best life!
I work long, 10-12 hour days most days, with rotating 3 day weekends so time is limited. I have a husband who also works full time and a sweet little by who is the light of my life! Two cats round out our little family.
Growing up until recently, I had no problem spending ridiculous amounts of money on stuff I didn’t even need. I would hit Walmart/Target, etc and drop $200-400 without blinking an eye.
My husband, on the other hand, was a super-saver. He wanted his checkbook balanced to the penny and hated to buy even the basic necessities if it meant he could save up a little more. It drove me nuts!
I think we rubbed off on one another and have settled somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. We realized shortly into our beginning of true adulthood that things needed to change. We couldn’t have opposite philosophies and succeed. We needed to be one united front.
We sold our over-sized house (who needs 3100 square feet for 2 people???) and made a plan to put the proceeds towards our credit cards (we had about $30k in debt on those). Thankfully, even though we had only lived there 2 years, we bought it before the housing boom and we stood to make enough to pay those debts and have a 10% down payment on our newer, much smaller home.
Growing up, I was taught about money but it didn’t really stick. I thought of my first credit card as free money. Take out the maximum every year for student loans to focus on school? Sounds great! Get the biggest house that you fell in love with right away? Of course!
This way of thinking led me to quickly pile on the debt. Six months after I graduated college I had accumulated (with credit debt, student loans and one hefty mortgage) almost HALF A MILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT! That’s INSANE!
This blog is to share my journey with 100% honesty in how I’m getting debt-free, having more time for the things and people I love and eating clean without breaking the budget.
So this is where we will begin. With a plan and less starting debt, we can knock out the rest!
I hope you’ll join me in learning from my mistakes and celebrating my successes and that together we can save without going insane!