Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

What a fantastic holiday season! Friends, family and food:)

This new year, we have decided on our resolution. (drum roll...) Money! It sounds fun, right? Well, we are jumping on Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover to shore up our finances and become DEBT FREE! This will be VERY tough for us because we are not in a very difficult spot. We are not necessarily living paycheck to paycheck, and we have fun when we feel like it. Therefore, pushing ourselves to stay with this isn't a necessity for us, just something that will better our financial lives.

From the onset, we have been pretty concious of our money and have saved when we needed to (i.e. paying for our wedding with cash and not putting it on the credit card). However, when we could save money or put it toward paying off student loans, we would much rather grab a bite to eat at a nice restarurant. We love our food! The hard part of this is going to be not spending frivolously, even though we arn't in such a position where we can't.

I bought the Total Money Makeover (TMM) book and started reading through it. The goal is to "live like no one else, so you can live like no one else." In several "baby steps," the idea is to pay of all debt, create a large emergency fund, invest smartly, and live without any financial hardships for the rest of our lives. Sound good? It does to us, so we decided to take part.

Although Mr. Ramsey says we need to completely invest ourselves in the process, we feel we can avoid the "suffering" part and take it easy, spread it out, and eventually reach our goals. We'll reacces in a couple of months and see how it is going. Already though, just creating a budget and planning, we are already on track to pay off half of our debt (number of debts, not money) by the end of October. It is a pretty fun prospect.

There are lots of great tips and pointers in the book and is geared toward people that are in a vicious debt circle. We are not, so we're going to have fun with it:) I very much recommend it. It gives a very clear picture of how to make financial pains disappear.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year!

Sam