The Journey of a Hundred Thousand Dollars Begins with a Single Step...

$101,622.18.  That's how much my wife and I still owe on our mortgage.

$22,465.21.  That's how much we owe on our student loans.

$124,087.39.  That's how much debt we have, and that's exactly how much debt we're planning to pay off in the next forty months, by April of the year 2013.

We have been paying on these loans for a long time ... or at least what to us feels like a long time.  The student loan we've been paying on since 2000, when we got married.  The mortgage we've had since June 2004.  To a lot of people, this may not seem like a long time, but for us, it's been long.  Too long.

Why?  We've come to the realization that every month we are in debt to someone else is another month of our life which isn't ours.  Every dollar we owe to someone else is another minute, another hour, another day we have to work just to pay back to them what we owe.  Debt isn't the way to the life of luxury, it's a prison.

And my wife and I are planning to escape.

What makes us think we can do this?  When we got our home in 2004, we didn't have the money for a 20% down payment, so we did what a lot of folks (well, the smarter folks in situations like ours, at least) were doing -- we got a primary mortgage for 80% of the purchase price of the home, a second mortgage for 15%, then  made a 5% down payment.  Over the years, we'd occasionally throw a little extra at the second mortgage, but no amount of great importance.

Starting in mid December of 2008, we decided we'd had enough.  By that time, we'd reduced the loan to around $11,500, and by October of 2009, we had paid it off in full.  We also had bought a car in December of 2008, and financed just over $5,000 on it.  We paid a little bit on it in January, enough to defer payments for several months, then paid it off just a few weeks after the second mortgage.

We've paid off loans in the past and in short amounts of time.  We've done it before; we know we can do it again.

For some, this might seem impossible.  For others, the amounts we're talking about might be spare change.

Here's where my wife and I stand:

My wife is a teacher, making just over $40,000 a year.  I am ... well, I'm what I call a "miscellaneous".  I have several jobs (elementary school librarian, church music director, private piano teacher, composer), and this year I should make about $40,000 a year collectively from them.  Just over $80,000 a year (before taxes), and in 40 months, we're talking about not only paying for our various needs and wants, but also paying off almost $125,000 in debt?

Yes.  Yes we are.

And my wife and I are going to bring you along on the journey with us.  We're going to tell you what we're doing, how we're doing it, and what we could or should be doing differently.  We're going to share our triumphs with you, and hope you don't laugh too hard when we fall flat on our faces.

Most importantly, we hope to show you that living debt free is the way go, that those who think it can't be done are wrong, and that those who tell us it's stupid to pay off a mortgage early are inadvertently keeping us in a proverbial "debtors prison" from which so many of us think it's impossible to escape.

Well, dear reader, it is possible, it can be done, and we are going to do it