Life Change: This is now a blog about being a Princess. Sorry.

{{SPOILER ALERT: Oh goodness, I did not mean to throw out any baby vibes in my last post about what is to come from Let's Just Build a House. Oopsies. The post I promised and teased "Big Thing Checked off our Personal To-Do-List of 2014" is not a baby announcement. Thanks for all the babysitting offers. We'll take you up on those one day.}}

C-YA SmellsFargo.
One of the many student loans we paid off this year.

We are debt free. 

Yep.
Ok, kinda..debt free.

I say kinda because we do have a mortgage. But that’s it. Nothing else. 

No credit cards.
No student loans.
No car payments.
No piled up medical bills.
No furniture payments with that zero interest until 2030 business.
None of it!

Everything but our house has been paid for in CASH. Cold hard earned CASH. (and to be honest, a large chunk of the house was paid for in cash too!)

This is Lassie.

Even my (new to me) Jeep, we purchased in the Fall was paid for in cash and a trade for Blanche, my beloved Malibu.

Goodbye Blanche

Here is the thing. We don’t like owing people money. Some people don’t care. Some people are okay with having bills to pay every month. That’s okay. But that isn’t us. Trina and Adam don't like having debts.

And don't get me wrong, ...we do still have bills. Power, water, cable and internet, cell phone…homeowner’s & car insurance. Geesh, that’s still a lot of bills! But I guess we need water and power, even the internet. And we still have our house payment each month of course. We didn't knock that one out....yet.

How did we do it?

Well we have a rich long lost cousin that left us his fortune. 

Oh and also, we found out that I am the heiress to the throne in Genovia. This blog will now be only about Princess stuff…Hope you like it!

LOLJK WE WISH!!

Nope. Not really a princess. No long lost cousins leaving us their billions (that we know of yet...still have our fingers crossed).

We did it the hard way.
We saved our pennies. We don’t make big bucks. We have pretty average income for our age and the area we live in.

We didn’t read a book, or listen to a radio show, or any of that business. Although, we know some of those things work for others. But for us, it was simple: budgeting and saving.

Inexpensive Vacation on a budget. Still a BLAST & beautiful

Some of the other things we did that helped speed up the OPERATION: PAYOFF ALL THE DANG DEBT:

• Adam worked extra hours on Storm Team when it was offered. Sometimes he had to go to different states for a week at a time...but the extra money on the next paycheck was worth it!
• We skipped a few vacations. We really wanted to go to Mexico, or a cruise on vacation. But we planned a less expensive trip with our friends. We rented a beach house in gulf shores, Al for a 1/3 of the cost.
• We moved money every single month to savings. No matter what.
• For " fun & shopping" spending money I took old clothes and household items to consignment.
• Our stuff is not brand spankin' new. One example: Our 4-wheeler was a used purchase off craigslist, which Adam used his extra storm and savings of "fun money". 

We are big planners.
Now here is the thing. I get it. Not everyone is in the same boat. We don’t have kids yet. We don’t have the cost of diapers or daycare (which I hear is comparable to tuition at a University! YIPES.) But everyone has different debts. We had over 20k in student loans to pay off. That's a big debt for us.
We chose to build a big house, and tried to throw as much cash at that during the build to give us a break on our mortgage payment each month.  We started with paying cash for the land.

Why was it so high on our list of 2014 To-Do List?

• We are more comfortable when we have a plan for the future.
• We are trying to get ahead of the game before we have kids and have to spend buku bucks on daycare and diapers. 
• Adam and I are working on getting our retirement plans situated now --so we will not be working until we are 95 years old.
• We like to save for things like future cars and future appliances, way way way before we need them.
• We hate owing people money.

We probably could have done it sooner if we hadn’t built this house. Or maybe if we just built a smaller house. Maybe if I didn’t make as many trips to Target. Maybe if we didn’t choose the custom cabinets, or if Adam would've just skipped a few of his “MEN ONLY: BBQ, Blues & Beer” weekend trips to Memphis. But we did do it. That’s all that matters!

Do you have a plan to payoff debt? 

Have you paid off a big debt recently? How did you feel?