Missing The Mark

If you follow my boards on Pinterest, I'm sure you have seen my board called "Debt Free by 30." I named it this a few years ago (before having my second child) and thought we would be done way sooner than that.

I should start laughing now.

I turned 30 yesterday and we still have debt. I've talked about it before. It's not a huge amount of debt, but it is still there reminding me daily of its existence.

And to be honest, I'm a little disappointed. This was something I really wanted to be done with now.

And at the same time, I'm okay with it. A lot has happened since I set this goal of being debt free by 30. We completed our family with our second child, we moved to a new place, we bought a house, and have done fun things as a family.

Does this mean that I will stop working to get our debt paid off? Definitely not. I have a plan in place for it to all be gone next year and am still working on ways of getting it paid off a bit sooner than my plan.

But I won't stop living. I won't stop celebrating birthdays with fun outings or trips to our favorite restaurants (like the Hibachi we had yesterday for mine). I won't make us live off junk food just to hit that debt free goal sooner; our health is way more important than that right now.

I know that probably sounds like I'm not willing to work on getting rid of this debt at all. And that is not the case.

I will cut our eating out by making sure that we have quick convenience foods at the house. Running late or just not feeling like cooking is a huge cause for us to spend more than we should on eating out.

I will be working to lower our electricity bill by keeping electronics off for larger parts of the day than we are used to. It also helps that it is winter right now so our electric bill is a bit lower than budgeted anyway.

We will be taking less trips to lower our fuel consumption. Again, it is winter right now so we wouldn't be traveling as much right now anyway, but this is one category that we can save a ton of money on if we work on it.

I will focus a bit more on couponing or at least shopping for good deals. I will be the first to admit that I actually don't understand or like the whole "extreme couponing" fad. I mean, I get that you can get a bunch of stuff for free, but the amount of time it seems to take for that just doesn't seem worth it to me. I would rather spend that time with my family. So for me, couponing will be on things I already have on my list and I will look for the best deal on most things.

And I'll keep working my reward sites online to bring in just a little extra money. I don't make a ton on these, but I also don't spend a ton of time doing them either.

So there you have it: my admission of failure and my plan to succeed over the next year. I plan on starting to write more about our budget and our progress starting in January (because I want to start super fresh in the new year) and will definitely post a follow up to this post a year from today.

A little tid-bit I heard yesterday that I wanted to share that really brought about my acceptance of this goal: We all know that too much of anything is a bad thing and this goes for personal finance as well. Don't get so busy paying off your debt or building your savings that you let life completely pass you by.

Hope you all have a fantastic day!