The evening of Thursday April 23rd we made our way over to our dear friends, Nate & Paige's house for dinner and to watch Dave Ramsey's Town Hall for Hope. Jason and I used this as our semi-official "kickoff" for our debt elimination. It was a lot of fun and some good laughs, Dave has some good philosophies on money, in my humble opinion. So now we have been kicked off and sent home to do it on our own. Speaking of doing it on our own:
We received our tax return sometime late Thursday/early Friday and with that......drumroll please.......I said drumroll please...........we paid off the first of three credit cards!!! WOO HOO!!!
We will also be able to make a large payment on the second card. I decided kids are great for tax returns. ;)
We have started work on the house. We are trying to figure out how we are going to fix the deck and put a new roof on, it's not really in the budget, but has to be done in order for the house to sell. We are very excited to have the first of many hurdles down and are optimistic that the others will continue to be tackled as we work toward our goals. We leave you with a quote from Anika's all time favorite movie (I know all my peeps will know what it's from ;) ): "In the immortal words of The Doors "The time to hesitate is through."
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Everyone.......we have some 'xplainin to do!!
For those of you that know us, ignore this part. For those of you that don't and just happened across our little path of super magnificence.....hold onto your hats:
We are The Swensens, Jason, Anika & Akina. We live in South Dakota and we, like pretty much all Americans, are in debt. We don't like debt, it should be included in the list of four letter words that should never cross a persons lips. That being said, we will now tell you about our little journey that we have decided to embark on. :)
Here is our dream, laugh if you will, but we LOVE it and are SO excited about it:
First and foremost, we want to be debt free. This means no home mortgage, no car loans, no credit cards and no school loans. We have quite a few steps we are going to take to accomplish this. First, we are going to sell our house. Yes, we will move into an apartment. Yes, there will be less space, and, YES! We can handle it and live with it. It is a very short term sacrifice to reach a long term dream. To reach the goal of selling the house and moving into an apartment, we must first purge ourselves of all things unnecessary. We will be going through our entire house and only keeping what we deem necessary. This "Spring" cleaning will result in........garage sale!!! After the sale of the house we will put all the money we save from paying the mortgage, utility bills, maintenance, etc. towards credit cards. We will follow Dave Ramsey's plan for this and start paying on the card with the lowest balance first. Then the snowball effect will start. Here is our goal: We believe that we can have everything paid off, EVERYTHING, including the car and school loans and be 100% debt free within 2 years.
Second:
Once we are debt free, the whole amount that was going into paying off our debt will go into savings. We will be in save, save, save mode.
Third:
After we have our goal amount saved up (this is, of course, in addition to the recommended safety net by Dave Ramsey) we plan to buy some land outright, no mortgage and on that land construct a Yurt dwelling. If you don't know what a Yurt is, please visit http://www.rainieryurts.com/ and check them out. We are planning to live somewhere warm, and my personal preference, very close to a nice, sunny, warm, OCEAN beach. Once we have constructed our yurt, we will plant a large garden and quite possibly sell some of its yield at a local farmer's market. All of our friends will be more than welcome to come visit us for a nice beach vacay!!! As of yet, we have not decided where we will end up, but some of the destinations have included Costa Rica, southern Florida, possibly, but probably not southern Cali (because let's just face it, California is cuckoo!!!). If you have any suggestions for beautiful, warm destinations with gorgeous beaches, let us know.
So, ultimately, this is a 5 year plan. It could take us longer, it could take us not so long. Either way, we would love to have you enjoy this journey with us. If you want to be positive and encouraging, please leave us some feedback. If you want to be negative, we're really not that interested because it is our plan and dream, not yours. I am going to try to update as much as possible, but I forget a lot of stuff a lot of the time, so I will give it my best shot. So until next time!!
Peace out!!
We are The Swensens, Jason, Anika & Akina. We live in South Dakota and we, like pretty much all Americans, are in debt. We don't like debt, it should be included in the list of four letter words that should never cross a persons lips. That being said, we will now tell you about our little journey that we have decided to embark on. :)
Here is our dream, laugh if you will, but we LOVE it and are SO excited about it:
First and foremost, we want to be debt free. This means no home mortgage, no car loans, no credit cards and no school loans. We have quite a few steps we are going to take to accomplish this. First, we are going to sell our house. Yes, we will move into an apartment. Yes, there will be less space, and, YES! We can handle it and live with it. It is a very short term sacrifice to reach a long term dream. To reach the goal of selling the house and moving into an apartment, we must first purge ourselves of all things unnecessary. We will be going through our entire house and only keeping what we deem necessary. This "Spring" cleaning will result in........garage sale!!! After the sale of the house we will put all the money we save from paying the mortgage, utility bills, maintenance, etc. towards credit cards. We will follow Dave Ramsey's plan for this and start paying on the card with the lowest balance first. Then the snowball effect will start. Here is our goal: We believe that we can have everything paid off, EVERYTHING, including the car and school loans and be 100% debt free within 2 years.
Second:
Once we are debt free, the whole amount that was going into paying off our debt will go into savings. We will be in save, save, save mode.
Third:
After we have our goal amount saved up (this is, of course, in addition to the recommended safety net by Dave Ramsey) we plan to buy some land outright, no mortgage and on that land construct a Yurt dwelling. If you don't know what a Yurt is, please visit http://www.rainieryurts.com/ and check them out. We are planning to live somewhere warm, and my personal preference, very close to a nice, sunny, warm, OCEAN beach. Once we have constructed our yurt, we will plant a large garden and quite possibly sell some of its yield at a local farmer's market. All of our friends will be more than welcome to come visit us for a nice beach vacay!!! As of yet, we have not decided where we will end up, but some of the destinations have included Costa Rica, southern Florida, possibly, but probably not southern Cali (because let's just face it, California is cuckoo!!!). If you have any suggestions for beautiful, warm destinations with gorgeous beaches, let us know.
So, ultimately, this is a 5 year plan. It could take us longer, it could take us not so long. Either way, we would love to have you enjoy this journey with us. If you want to be positive and encouraging, please leave us some feedback. If you want to be negative, we're really not that interested because it is our plan and dream, not yours. I am going to try to update as much as possible, but I forget a lot of stuff a lot of the time, so I will give it my best shot. So until next time!!
Peace out!!
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