#10: My car is mine, all MINE!

Today we hit a major milestone in our journey to becoming debt free, which we started in the spring of 2012 when we completed Financial Peace University (read about what I learned in the class here).

As of this afternoon when Shane hit the “send payment” button, my car is paid off! And we didn’t just make the minimum payment either, we paid off 13 months ahead of schedule. Shane is amazing at our budgeting and has had us debt-snowballing the crap out of everything. 

It hasn't always been easy though on the path to financial security. We did have to make sacrifices along the way. We tried using Virgin Mobile instead of Verizon for a while, and it worked okay in Baltimore but not so much when we moved to Nashville. We also had to sell Shane's Jetta Sportwagen in 2012, which was very sad, but it sold to a nice home for several thousand more than we owed on it, and we got to get rid of a $500 a month payment. He was also driving a company service vehicle up until about a month ago so it really wasn't worth it to pay that much to let it sit all week and drive it only on the weekends.

We now have TWO completely paid off cars since he bought his mom's Suzuki Grand Vitara in December for cash. Now all that money we'd been spending on payments can go into a repair fund and work towards the rest of our debt. 

Our next priority in the debt snowball is Shane’s school loan, which should be paid off in the next few months, and then we’re on track to start saving for our six months of living expenses emergency fund. 

We have been extremely blessed with Shane’s job and mine. While I do complain about my job a lot, it’s thanks to my salary that we are able to put such large payments on our debt every month. I am also very proud of us for mostly sticking to a budget and not mindlessly spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars without having anything to show for it like we used to. 

While we haven’t stayed on the Financial Peace path 100% since completing the course in 2012, I feel like we’re in a really amazing place right now and I hope we can keep it up!