For the last 3 months, Jacob and I have been living a debt-free life! And I have to tell you, it’s amazing. We have truly felt like different people since being debt-free. There are definitely so many wonderful perks of living a debt-free life.
If you are debt-free, then I’m sure you experience this too! And if you’re working on becoming debt-free, then this is what I hope motivates you to continue on your journey! 
Vacation More
An awesome perk of being debt-free is getting to vacation more! When we were in the process of our debt-free journey, we didn’t really get to go on vacations. We went on a couple trips with our families, but they helped cover the cost.
Now that we are debt-free, we’ve been saving for a trip to Kauai in May! In July we’ll celebrate 3 years of marriage and we haven’t been on a vacation just the two of us since our honeymoon!
We are so excited to now be in this stage of life where we get to travel more and do more of what we want!
Saving More
Wanting to retire someday? It’s so much easier to save when you are debt-free! When we were in our debt-free journey, we saved a little bit for retirement, but didn’t do a whole lot. Most of our monthly budget was going toward our debt!
But now that we’re debt-free, we’ve been putting 8% of our income to our 401k. It’s been so awesome to watch our savings go up rather than watching our debt number go down. Saving is amazing for your finances and is definitely needed, but it’s not as possible to do when you have debt.
Eating Out More
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, then you know that I am very hesitant with eating out. This is a category that many people go over in, and it’s what we really sacrificed when we were on our debt-free journey. Date nights were sparse as we ate at home for most of our meals.
Now that we are debt free, we have gone out to eat a little bit more! Of course it’s still budgeted for each month, but we are enjoying our time out now that we have no more debt payments.
Ability To Move Quickly
When we paid off all our debt, we decided to move out of my parents’ house. We were thinking of moving in January, but we ended up moving sooner! We visited an apartment in November to get a good feel for what was out there. And we ended up loving the unit! Better yet, they were running an amazing deal because people apparently don’t like to move in November in Oregon!
This was to our advantage and you bet we took the deal. We ended up moving 2 months earlier than we expected, but since we were debt free, we were able to cash flow all of our moving expenses.
We were able to pay our deposit and first month’s rent. We even rented a U-haul and bought some new nightstands. Coming from living at my parents’ house, we also had to stock up on essentials like toilet paper, detergent and soap. All in all, we spent a few hundred dollars on moving expenses.
And from when we visited the apartment to when we moved, it had been one whole week. We were able to move that quickly because of the fact that we are now debt-free and didn’t have debt payments eating up our budget.
Planning For Future Family
For us being debt-free, we have been talking a lot more about when we will be starting to have a family. Not that you totally can’t have babies while being in debt, but for us being debt-free, we have a lot more options!
More particularly to me working or staying home. I’m still not sure exactly what I’ll do when we have babies, but I would like to spend more time at home! Maybe that means working part-time. But it’s exciting that we get to have options when it comes to planning for our family’s future now that we’re debt-free!
It’s Totally Worth It
I feel like a lot of my posts about our debt-free journey have been about how difficult the journey is. And it totally was. We sacrificed a lot of things during our time in debt. And I was super open about that with my readers when we were in that stage of life. And now that we’re in the next stage, I want to share really how amazing it is.
Working toward becoming debt-free is totally worth it, you guys! If you are on your journey, don’t stop. Keep going. It may be hard in the journey, but you’ll thank yourself later when you are able to reap the benefits of being debt-free.
So keep on, friends! You’ll get there soon. And it will all be worth it in the end.
Let me know in the comments below!
What do you love about living a debt-free life? Or what are you looking forward to when you are debt-free?