While we were on our debt-free journey, I shared a lot on my blog about our financial journey. The hard parts of paying off debt, and the celebration of when we became debt-free. But there has been so much that we are celebrating as we continue our financial journey post-debt.

We have been enjoying our new apartment, we have some exciting trips in the books for 2018, and have been saving our money for some awesome financial goals! The last 6 months of being debt-free have been amazing. And it’s exciting to dream about our financial future without debt! Here are some changes in our lives over the last 6 months, things we are working on in our finances, and other exciting things happening for us in this season of life!

Renting Our Apartment

During the last 13 months of our debt-free journey, we lived with my parents! We were able to pay less in rent which really helped us to pay off our debt quickly. But when we paid off our debt in October 2017, we knew that we wanted to move out on our own again. We figured we’d move in January or February, but we ended up finding a perfect apartment for an amazing price in October.

Since then, we’ve been living in our own apartment. It’s a whole 2 bedroom and 2 bath and more space than we need, but we are so thankful to call this apartment home. I have since made a few Target runs and have been filling our place with some fun and homey decor. 🙂

Our lease is up in November 2018 and we’ll have to figure out what’s next. We really want to buy a house, but with the market as crazy as it is, it is pretty much impossible to afford a starter home in our area. So we we have to renew our lease for another year, we’ll be just fine.

I will say that I have struggled with contentment a lot during our debt-free journey. It was hard to see what everyone else was doing when we weren’t doing much. But I have found so much contentment and joy in our new apartment. I literally come home every day from work and tell Jacob how thankful I am to live in our apartment.

Vacationing

An awesome thing that we get to do now that we’re debt-free is take more vacations! Next month, Jacob and I are going to Kauai, Hawaii to spend a week in paradise. This will be our first trip just the two of us since our honeymoon almost 3 years ago! We are so looking forward to this trip. We’ve been saving each month for this vacation and we have our budget ready to go!

In September, I am also going to FinCon in Orlando! I’m so excited for this trip to meet so many other personal finance bloggers and learn a lot about growing my online presence. My mom is also going on this trip with me and I can’t wait for it. 🙂

Jacob and I also decided to visit Disneyland this Christmas. It’s been something we’ve always wanted to do, and we want to go to Disneyland one more time before kids. We’ve never been during Christmas time, so this is the year!

All that to say, 2018 is definitely a year full of travels for us, and I’m so excited about it. It’s like we’re debt-free or something. 😉

Family

Right now we’re still a family of two. But we’d love to have a baby some time soon. I mean we do have that extra bedroom in our apartment… 😉 I was always so stern on doing everything in order of pay off debt, buy a house, and have a baby. But I now realize that it might not be the case (due to the high market) and that’s OK. Family is more important than thinking it’s bad for an infant to live in an apartment.

I would also like to be able to move from full-time to part-time, or even find something that I can do from home when we do have kids. This is why it would also be so awesome to make blogging a full-time gig. This is something that I’m working on and planning for right now for the future.

Our Financial Goals

Now for what you’ve been waiting for! Since we are debt-free, we are continuing to work on our financial goals.

Emergency Fund

Right now our biggest financial goal is saving for our emergency fund. Before we save for cars or a house, we want to have a solid emergency fund in place. Six months of expenses is our goal, which is right at $12,000. We should be done with our full emergency fund by June. Only a few more months to go! This money will sit in our bank account and won’t be touched except for a true and needed emergency.

Investing

For my Dave Ramsey friends, you may not agree, but we’ve been investing while saving for our emergency fund. This is because of a few reasons: we are young and have time and compound interest on our side, and our employers provide a 401k match.

We contributed 4% while getting out of debt, but starting in November 2018, we increased our contribution to 8% before our employer match. Once our emergency fund is complete, we plan to increase to about 12-13% while we are still saving for a house. Now is the time since we don’t have kids and the additional expenses that come along with little ones. I know this is something we won’t regret when we’re 60.

Cars

I am still driving the ’98 Camry and Jacob drives his ’01 Tacoma. Reliable cars, but a little old… We plan to get new cars in the next year. We will sell our cars (probably on Craigslist) and plan to spend no more than the profit of the car sale plus $10,000 to replace both. This should get us a couple decent new-to-us cars. We plan to save for the cars once the emergency fund is taken care of.

House

The house that we dream of! As I shared above, we are excited to have a house some day, but we also know that the market has been insane. We’re not in any rush to get a house. We enjoy living in our apartment, and don’t want to make the biggest financial purchase and one of our biggest decisions based on fear that the news keeps sending us of rising interest rates.

Don’t buy a house until you’re truly ready. I preach it and follow it. Once our cars are taken care of, we plan to start saving for a down payment on a house. And as soon as the right place comes along and we have the money, we’ll buy. But we won’t be stretching our budget and savings to do so.

We want a house, but not enough to risk our financial future. We’ll wait out the craziness of the market, and that’s okay. We’re hoping that by late 2019 or 2020 we will be able to buy depending on the market.

Careers

As I shared earlier, my desire for my career would be to take this blogging thing to the next level. But I know that takes time. Otherwise, I am working full-time in accounting for a non-profit. I do love my job. I enjoy getting up every morning and going to work. I work with amazing people and the mission behind the work I do gives me so much purpose. I plan to continue working with this non-profit for as long as I can.

Jacob has been growing his career in marketing. He’s been a product marketing specialist for a software company for about a year and he really enjoys his work too. His hope is to continue to grow in his marketing career with his company as well. I can’t wait to see where he is with his career in the years to come! It’s always encouraging to do something you love every day for work.