Almost Seven Months of Making Love, Not Debt - A Retrosepective

Posted on June 26, 2006 by Him and tagged about, debt, festivals, fun, net_worth

It took a lot of badgering to get Her to buy my idea about starting a personal finance blog that deals with money and relationships. Her finally bought it, and on the first day of 2006, we wrote our first post. Ironically, the current majority of posts on this blog are written by Her.

Back then, we were merely beginners in the game of personal finance. We erroneously included our non-wealth building life insurance as a part of our net worth, putting our net worth in the positive. When we realized the error, we truly realized how much work we have to do, not to mention how much we are in the negative.

Since then, about seven months have passed. We've been steadily making our way into the positive net worth, but more importantly, we're steadily getting out of debt. It is easy to see that from the numbers, though. Here's a smattering of things we have also improved upon since we've started this blog:

-- The interest on my credit card debt now ranges from 0% (until April 2007, and will be paid off in September 2006) to 2.99%; a far cry from the 12.99% to 20.99% that I had. For all of our credit card debt, we're paying 5% interest or below.
-- Her dropped the interest rates on her variable interest rate student loans by a few percentage points.
-- We've maximized the use of coupons.
-- We haven't accrued any new debt. Anything that we put on a zero balance credit card is paid off ASAP, and only put on that credit card to reap the rewards. We're still committed to not going into more debt for the wedding.
-- We have both received raises. (hmm, I realized that our income isn't up on the site anymore...we'll have to look into changing that)
-- We've planned to get out of all credit card debt by the time we get married.
-- I sold my car a few months before I started this blog. Now we only have one car that we seldom drive, saving us tons of money of insurance, maintenance, gas, and other automobile related expenses.
-- Most importantly, we've been able to manage our debt so that it is not a barrier to the things we like to do everyday. This past weekend we've enjoyed the first of three summer music festivals, Intonation Music Fest. We're headed to Cirque Shanghai, Ravinia twice, and other Chicago Festivals this summer. By squeezing our budget on most days, we've figured out how to enjoy life and pay off debt. We're only in our 20's once, so we figure we'll enjoy it while we're living in a big city such as Chicago and can physically and mentally tackle everything. We figure that we'll be out of debt by the time we have kids, and then we'll have no time for all of the things that we're doing today.

We've been at this for seven months, and we're exited to see our progress. We can't wait to see what's coming up.

Comments/Trackbacks

Trackback URL: http://www.makelovenotdebt.com/MT/mlnd-trackbacks.cgi/948

Jill | Jun 26, 2006

Wow! You two are doing so well. To add to your list of accomplishments, you are amusing others and inspiring them to keep up with their financial goals.
Suze Orman may talk about us Young, Fabulous and Broke people in our 20's, but we have good heads on our shoulders.

On our way to financial freedom! Onward, ho! (Not that kind of ho.)

Reply to this comment

Brandon | Jun 27, 2006

Keep up the great work, I always enjoy reading the site.. My girlfriend and I are also in Chicago, in our 20's and are working on clearing up the debt (or as she likes to call it, my debt) before marriage!

Reply to this comment

Sue | Jul 8, 2006

I'm really happy for the two of you. When I first starting reading the blog I was blown away by all of the debt, but the real point is to learn from your mistakes and move on with a plan...which is exactly what it sounds like you are doing. It's unfortunate, but I think there is NO finanical education for young adults and then they get bombarded with credit card offers in college. It's truly a disservice that people are not provided with more education in high school before you go out into the world.

Keep up the good job. You may feel resentful when you're friends have so many more "things" but it will be outweighed by your level of discipline and self-confidence of overcoming this obstacle together.

Reply to this comment




Have you read our Comment Policy?

At Make Love, Not Debt, we encourage reader participation and constructive criticism, however unfavorable your position may be. In order to keep things civil we have a few ground rules.

To facilitate off-blog discussion and combat comment spam, you are required to provide an email address.

Some HTML is allowed in the post. It is limited to the following: a href, strong, em, ul, li, blockquote

For bold please use the tag <strong></strong> and for italics please use <em></em>. For any HTML usage, please remember to close your tags!

Images are not allowed.

Comments with 3 to 4 links will be moderated. Comments with 5 or more links will be marked as spam.

We DO NOT, under any circumstance, tolerate personal attacks, racism, sexism, or spam. Should we see any of the above posted on our blog, we will take one of the following actions:

  1. If your URL seems spammy but your comment is benign, we will delete the link to your URL and keep the full comment.
  2. Outright spammy comments will be junked, never to be seen.
  3. Offensive comments will either be deleted or disemvowelled.

If you are not comfortable with our comment policy, please do not leave a comment.

Live Comment Preview

Your comment says: