Family and i are debt free! Wahoo!

**mrwiseowl** · 02-07-2011, 08:05 AM

I just made the final payments to our credit cards tonight to announce my family and I are now debt free!

I'll share my testimony by giving you guys our backgrounds, pre debt spending habits, when we chose to conquer debt and which books/resources we chose to use.

Both my wife and I are in our mid to post 20's. I'm 28 and she's 25. We live in Kodiak, Alaska whaaaa... Alaska? Yeap, Alaska! For those who don't know the cost of living in Kodiak is extremely high. I would probably rate it as high as living in Hawaii or in New York, New York. Examples: 1 gallon of unleaded gas as of right now is $4.09 and the cost of 1 pound of Roma Tomatoes is at $3.99.

Okay now back to our backgrounds. We got married in early 2009 and I took the initiative that we both were on the same page on how we managed our finances i.e. no spending money unless we both agreed on it. She had no debt to bring into the marriage pre-wedding but I did. I had a little under $11,000 to bring into our marriage pre-wedding. Our wedding cost us about $800 out of our pocket and the rest was covered by our family. So that brought us to about a little under $12,000. Our spending habits for the first year wasn't healthy at all so we chose to buy a few books on Amazon.com and see what we could get out of them. Out of the few books we bought one book stood out the most and it was 'America's Cheapest Family' written by the Echonomides. We call that book our Bible for finances! Other resources we kept handy was going to crown.org, yahoo finances, msn finances, streetceo.com just to name a few.

It took a while getting use but once the ball got rolling we were able to pay off all of our debt in one year! Our truck loan's remaining balance of $3,800, my remaining student loan of $3,200, our credit card debt of $5,000ish and that was with a new born baby boy in the picture!

So here's to us being DEBT FREE! CHEERS!