FREEDOM!!!!

I am so happy, so thankful, and so humbled to be able to say that we are officially DEBT FREE!!!! We took on the Dave Ramsey plan a little over 2 years ago and it is the best thing we have ever done for our family. Let me paint the picture of how it all started:
Dan and I moved to Starkville from Birmingham in April 2008 leaving behind a house on the market. Well, time came and went, a new realtor, thoughts of renting, and a full year later(which felt more like an eternity sometimes) we finally sold our house...but for less than what we owed. Thankfully, we have an AMAZING family who helped us out along the way and we were able to pay off the house debts and start over.
And start over we did! The month after we closed on our house, we decided to start our financial freedom journey. Dan had read the Dave Ramsey books before and had listened to his radio program pretty regularly, so he just had to convince me to get on board, which wasn't too hard to do because of the financial burden we had just bore. So, we made a budget...had lots of "our financial future" planning talks...set up goals...and got going. We had a small credit car balance, a car payment and student loans totalling around $22,000.
We started chipping away little by little at the debts while still allowing ourselves to live. My biggest fear going into all of this was being miserable for 2 years while we got rid of our debt. But, the beauty of the plan is that through good budgeting, we were able to still have a pretty good time while working hard. Sure, we could have been done a little sooner if we had given up more, but I don't regret the way we did it. It worked for this family! Oh yeah...I almost forgot that along the way, we also sold our cars in order to pay cash for a good family vehicle as well as a "beater" for Dan. The process has totally changed the way we look at things.
In the beginning, we also took the Financial Peace University class at our church. And another amazing part of all of this is how it has grown our spiritual lives as well. We are not lucky; we are blessed.
Now, we still have lots of road ahead of us and lots more that we would like to accomplish, but I can't wait to see where God and this new financial freedom takes us.