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For My New Readers


I've spent about a year now blogging about our journey to paying off our loans. We're down to about $31,000 left on our once $100,000 of student loan debt. If you're relatively new to our journey, let me give you a quick rundown of how we are doing it. 

Kevin and I don't do anything fancy with our finances. We live well within our means. If you add together our two incomes from our primary jobs, we make about what a household of two starting teachers in Omaha make...except that we work year round. 

Why do I tell you this? 

Because, like I said, we aren't doing anything fancy. We aren't living off of a huge inheritance nor did we win the lottery. I'm not complaining about what we make, we both have a steady income, Kevin is now able to work Monday- Friday rather than weekends, and I'm working in a profession that I went to school for. No complaints. 

We are able to pay off so much debt because of two reasons: 
1. We spend as little as possible
2. We work extra

That's it! There are months that our second jobs are able to almost double our income, and some months it barely helps at all. On average our second jobs help pay our rent. We make extra money on etsy and through our photography. We've worked at both many years, to help build up nice little side businesses. This didn't happen overnight. 

If we didn't have those, either of us could have picked up a part time job though to bring in extra cash. You don't have to be an entrepreneur to make extra money.

We make small changes in our life that save us big money. We eat in, live in a 1 bedroom apartment, spend money sparingly, got rid of cable and have slow internet, we never spend money we don't have, we talk about our hopes, dreams and make sure we're on the same page. We're very aware of the money we have and the bills that will be coming up. We don't ignore financial situations that get us down in hopes they will go away, but rather we plan for the future. 

What's been the hardest for us? As you can see, we stay pretty busy. Finding time for just the two of us can be difficult some weeks. We're in our second year of marriage, and we've been working on making sure we each help the other out when work gets overwhelming. Sometimes we have to sit down and schedule time together, or some evenings I have to pull the ottoman next to our computer desk to sit with Kevin, head on his arm, and talk about my day while he is working. Our cat, Lady Grey, will sit with us in her special box too.



We lead very busy lives, but we make it work. We are partners. We share equally in the cooking (or lack thereof) cleaning and general household duties. I prefer to take on paying the bills and the grocery shopping, while Kevin often does laundry, trash and the random errand running that needs to get done. We both do dishes, cleaning, etc. Kevin hates cleaning the litterbox, and I hate cleaning the toilet...we make it work for us!

So there is our not-so-secret secret, We keep it simple. Spend less than you make, and take on extra work to keep the ball rolling on debt reduction. And guess what...we are happy! Like really extraordinarily happy. 
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