I have to say, I'm impressed even with myself -- not a single post in all of 2012. I knew my wife and I were writing sporadically on this blog, but the last we wrote, my wife was barely pregnant with our son.
Fast-forward from October 2011 to January 2013, and things are much different. There are now three humans living in the house, one of them just over nine months old. Our son is crawling, standing, almost walking, gibbering, and generally being a source of joy and happiness in our lives. We're spending a small fortune on diapers every week, but thanks to a ton of gifts from friends, as well as some other friends with boys about a year older than our son, we've spent virtually nothing on clothes for him.
We've also been blessed with numerous toys from friends and family. We've bought precious few toys with any money out-of-pocket, and despite the modest number of toys he has, our son still seems happy, content ... and tends to gravitate to the same three or four toys no matter what we lay out for him to play with.
We also have a sizable library of books for him, and again, we've bought very few of them ourselves. Friends know our affinity for reading to our son and so will get us a book here or there, and thanks to our public library's summer reading program, we added several books we received as prizes for reading to our son. Of course, we've also made numerous trips to the library, so we have a virtually endless supply of reading material for him, all for almost no money.
He's eating solid foods now, but we're spending less than many folks because my wife is making nearly all his baby food herself. Apples, pears, green beans, even squash -- all of it is fresh before she cooks the living daylights out of it and then pulverizes it into oblivion before freezing it in ice cube trays for ready-made quantities of baby food. No worrying about little glass jars and going to the store -- we just open the freezer, take out a ziploc bag, toss a couple of cubes in the microwave to defrost, and voila! -- instant butternut squash.
Thankfully, our son has been a source of joy, and not a huge source of financial drain. That's not to say he hasn't had financial consequences on our lives, or been the source of many hard financial decisions. Perhaps the biggest is that I quit my job as an elementary school librarian at the end of May 2012 so that I could stay home with him during the day. This was a loss of about $10,000 a year before taxes, but considering the amount of money we would save on daycare -- not to mention the fact that he's being raised at home by his father and not some stranger with ten other kids to worry about -- it was absolutely the right choice.
As part of having our son, we also had many other financial decisions and events crop up. There were doctor and hospital bills, of course, which, even after insurance, still cost us several thousand out of pocket. There was the second car we bought -- a new 2012 Honda Fit -- which, like the Civic we already have, will be driven until the tires fall off. (Yes, we know most places advocate only buying used cars, but we appreciate having the warranty for the first several years, and the Hondas are so reliable that they scarcely depreciate for the first several years -- we could save maybe a thousand dollars on a year old Civic or Fit, but that's not enough savings to also inherit a year's worth of someone else's problems.)
So what it all comes down to is this -- a confession. As you can tell by looking at the numbers at the right (as of this writing over $47,000 left on the mortgage and 84 days to pay it off), we won't make our goal to be debt free in 40 months. Unless one of us wins the lottery (a long shot since we don't actually play the lottery), or some rich relative dies and leaves us a large inheritance (again, quite unlikely), it's just not going to happen.
That's not to say that paying off this debt is no longer a goal for us -- on the contrary, for the past six months and more, ever since our son arrived, virtually every extra dollar we've received has gone toward paying down the mortgage, so much so that we paid off nearly $29,000 in principal in 2012 alone. As it stands right now, if all goes well and according to calculations, we ought to have the mortgage paid off, at latest, by about March 2014 ... and it's entirely possible that we'll have it paid off before the end of 2013. Yes, that will put us at "Debt Free in About 49" instead of "Debt Free in 40", but we're fine with those extra few months.
Does that mean this blog and the goal behind it have been a failure? Well, yes, let's be honest, this blog has been pretty much of a failure -- when we can go for 14 months without writing anything, I'm not sure you can call that a success. But the goal -- to be debt free in 40 months -- has that been a failure? Absolutely not!
When my wife and I made the goal to be debt free, and when we made the arbitrary 40-month goal, we had no idea if we could do it or not. It was really a very pie-in-the-sky sort of dream. Based on our income and debt load, it wasn't impossible, but with my wife a public school teacher, and with me an elementary school librarian with a couple of piano lessons on the side, it sure didn't seem likely. Still, we committed to the goal anyway -- saving money, being frugal in how we spent money and consumed resources, searching for new streams of income.
I firmly believe that, because of this goal -- even though we won't hit it -- my wife and son and I are in the financial position we are now, and will be free of debt before any of us turns 36 years of age. If we had never set the goal of being debt free in 40 months, we wouldn't now be sitting here with the possibility of being debt free in 49.
So, that's where things stand now. I can't guarantee we'll post any more frequently, though I CAN guarantee you'll here all about it here when I make that last payment.
