Debt to Dreams

We have started the new year off well. Simplicity has made management relatively easy for us to this point. I have begun to trim our accounts and balances to make our finances as simple as possible. Our limited exposure to the markets makes our monthly gains highly dependent on our frugality and savings rate. January [...]

After watching the recent week long plunge of the Dow, it appears that people are very fearful which means if you are a buy and hold investor, now might be the time to get greedy. The problem in our family is that we don’t have much cash left to get greedy with. Here are the [...]

August has come and gone and our net worth continues to tumble. There is hope that we will soon be able to slow the loss thanks to some new help. I have officially handed over the reigns of budgeting and expense management to my wife! She has embraced this role and done a spectacular job, [...]

After 2 months of turbulent times following our cross country move, our household has finally settled down in our new surroundings and we are now catching up with our finances. We knew we had a difficult 2 months in June and July but I wasn’t sure just how bad it was until I ran the [...]

We continued to tread water again last month. We are balanced on an edge, living within our means each month, but not investing in our future. We are able to keep our monthly bills within our normal monthly cash flow. Unexpected expenses force us to dip into our savings to pay for them. Here are [...]

We managed to blow through the first quarter of 2008 in good shape considering all the changes we have undertaken. The slight bounce in the financial markets helped overshadow a lack of new contributions to our savings and investments. Our net worth is now above the -$50,000 level for the first time since December 2007. [...]

We have reached the end of a rough 1st quarter to 2008. We are still well below our net worth peak of -$45,237.37 in November of 2007 due to multiple factors. This was to be expected after our family navigated the expensive holiday season and added a new family member to boot! Voluntarily cutting your [...]

A bit late with the results…… mostly because I was afraid to look but we eeked out a slight gain for the month and that is all I could ask. The realities; read “challenges” of our family becoming a single income household are becoming more evident at this time. Here is the Damage for February: [...]

By the numbers we are off to a rocky start in 2008. The $6000+ drop in our net worth is the largest in the past 13 months. About half of this loss was due to the falling market but the other half was due to the interest from my consolidated student loans for 2007 finally [...]

After watching the angst on Wall Street for the first two weeks of this year, I can take some solace in the fact that our family enters 2008 on a much better financial foundation than when we started 2007. We have eliminated all of our high interest debt on both our credit cards and school [...]

We managed to finish our first year on a positive note posting a $1,817.91 gain in our net worth which brought our total gain for the year to just over $41,000 dollars. Over the course of the past year we managed to maintain positive growth in 10 out of the 12 months. The majority of [...]

Even before running the numbers for our household I can predict that 2008 will not be as financially successful for us as 2007. In 2007 we were able to take advantage of having two incomes, one household and no children to pay down some debts and accumulate a comfortable cushion of cash for emergencies. As [...]

After a steady start to the year, the market turbulence continues to make its presence felt. Our balance sheet shows more outflows than inflows due to the renewal of family insurance policies and one time expenses related to the holiday season. This increase in spending made it difficult to offset out loses with savings alone. [...]

Yesterday marked the first full year of our journey from my six-figured educational debt to financial independence. We have made quite a bit of progress over the past 12 months, increasing our net worth by almost $40,000. We have been able to do this with the simple strategy of spending less than we earn and [...]

More than once in my life I have been told that if nothing else, at least I am consistent. Our family’s consistency showed again last month with yet another steady gain of $4000 for the month. More importantly I flnally paid off the last of my consumption credit card debt marking the first time since [...]