My name is Marissa and I’m a wife to my husband Jacob and mom to two small boys. I’m so passionate about budgeting, working on financial goals and also fully enjoying life with my family. It took me awhile to see that we truly could do both!
When my husband, Jacob, and I got married in 2015, we had just graduated college and had over $80k of student loan debt combined! It was quite overwhelming as we were just starting entry-level jobs and didn’t make much.
We had dreams for our future. We wanted to be able to be homeowners some day and have children. I also had the desire to be a stay-at-home-mom. But we didn’t know how we could do all of that with so much debt. So we decided that we wanted to pay it off as soon as possible.
That’s how we started budgeting. Every month we set a plan for our money using a budget. And then we tracked how our spending was going as well as the progress we were making on our debt.
We eventually paid off our debt in 2.5 years, but our journey was not perfect…
During that time, we thought we couldn’t enjoy our lives at all! We lived in a tiny, moldy 1 bedroom apartment. We didn’t go out to eat. We took public transportation, which gave me anxiety every day. Honestly, our lives were miserable at the time. And my mental health suffered because of that.
Did we pay off the debt? Yes.
Was it taxing on our mental health and marriage? Yes!
That’s when we knew that something had to change. We already had a budget. So we began budgeting for fun things in life too as we moved onto our next goal: saving.
We moved to a nicer apartment. We budgeted for regular date nights. We even budgeted for vacation and got to take an amazing trip to Hawaii in 2018! And from there, we found the balance in working on our goals while enjoying life, and working toward those big dreams.
From there, we saved a full 6 month emergency fund, started investing for retirement, saved for a down payment and bought our first house, and contributed to our son’s college savings!
And then the dream… I eventually quit my job to be a stay-at-home-mom!
And we have done these things while taking regular family vacations, regularly eating out, and spending money on things that we enjoy!
Budgeting every month allowed us to do all these things.
And I want to show you how you can too.
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