Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Introduction

Welcome to my new blog!

This is my first time doing this and I am going to try to learn the ropes of blogging pretty quickly. 

I am creating this blog to try to encourage other young professionals who may be swamped in debt from student loans and go on to a financially free life. 

I have been married 2 years now. In that 2 years, my wife and I have both graduated with Masters degrees in Education, bought a car, a home, adopted 2 dogs and a cat, and never thought about student loans until August, when the payments started rolling. We pay almost $800 a month in student loans. With a car, house, and a couple of small credit card balances we pay just over $3,000 a month to debt! We are drowning from this. We would like to have kids in the near future, but with debt it is impossible. We also would like to travel  and see this beautiful world, but we can't because we can only afford a small amount of savings each month. 

I am writing this blog as we begin our journey to becoming debt free. I am hoping this will bring encouragement to people who may be in our same place. We are going to try and follow Dave Ramsey for the most part. I do not believe everything he says, but we will do a debt snowball and try to get that rolling ASAP. We have a couple of ideas that will get this rolling and I will keep you all updated on this as it happens. We are planning on beginning this in September. I will update you guys on important things each week and link other blogs that have some ideas to help get out of debt faster.

Moreover, I really enjoy discussing and reading over investments. At night, I will spend countless hours looking into mutual funds, stocks, and precious metals to understand more about them. I am the kind of person that really researches something before I pursue it, especially when it comes to money. I really enjoy looking at the past performances of stocks and mutual funds to grasp where their future may be headed. When I was in college, I invested $400 in stocks in 6 different companies. That money has now grown to $2,500. If I only I had invest all of my saved money at the time!! So, I learned my lesson and when I see a deal, I jump on it instantly. I will discuss some of the stocks and funds I may be pursuing to get feedback from any of the readers. I am by no means an expert on anything and I enjoy feedback and thought to gain a different perspective on a topic. 

Feel free to contact me for any questions. Thanks for checking this out. 

2 comments:

  1. Have you thought about a student loan consolidation? Most of the time it will drop you interest and payment but it will spread the loan out over a longer period. You can still pay as much as you want but the interest and payment would be lower if there was an emergency one month. I completed a bachelor in chemistry and paid ½ those loans off. Than went back and got an MBA. That was 7 years ago and I will completely pay me student loans off this December. Just to let you know my consolidated interest is 3.125%. I did get a % decrease for auto payment and then another after 3 years of consistent payments.

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  2. We consolidated some of our loans. We saved .5% in interest and reduced our payment by $30 a month. So it was definitely worth doing it. We want to try and stay away from it because if we save too much money, we will no longer be aggressive and think we have all the money in the world!

    That is wonderful about your debts being paid off in December. That will feel great I am sure. I can't wait until we get to say we are debt free. Congratulations again.

    Thank you for your idea and reading!

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