A Blog Post 6 Years in the Making

This is a long story, and for that I apologize. Kelly and I six years ago decided that something had to change about the way we were living. We had been married for a year, we both had full time jobs, our new son was just months old and we were broke. How can two people that make good wages have to worry about how they will pay for groceries?
The problem was us. Unfortunately, we were "normal". When we wanted a new car, we bought it. When we wanted a vacation, we took it. When we wanted to buy a house, we moved into one sixty days after we decided to do it.
How did we pay for all of this? 60 month car loans, plane tickets on a credit card, and probably the last zero down mortgage our loan company ever got to write. We didn't have any money because we had many things that we "deserved", but couldn't pay for.
Enter the teary scene of a stressed out new mom not able to drive home to visit her family because we had no money to pay for the gas. That was when we looked for help. We found Dave Ramsey and signed up for his Financial Peace classes. 
The first crazy thing we did was sell my first, (and last) brand new car. My Honda Fit was so pretty and zippy, but expensive. I think once you sell your car and buy an Oldsmobile Cutlass for $600 cash you are committed to a goal.

We knew getting debt free would take us years, but we also knew even if we didn't follow the plan those years would pass anyway.
As far as we can gather we paid off $90,000 dollars in Credit Card, Car, Personal and School Loan debt. We would have an exact number but we had one computer die in the middle of the journey and we were too cheap to get the old budget sheets off of it! On top of that we cash flowed some modest family vacations, cars, and the down payment for our now house.
We don't use debt anymore, it did us no favors. The only loan we now have is our mortgage. That will be the target as soon as we get our 3-6 month emergency fund in place and up our investments. We will also loosen the budget up a little and start having a little more fun!
Kelly and I both made sacrifices during this process. We have both had second jobs, Kelly paid off his largest credit card debt (around $16,000) by delivering Pizza's at night three days a week for an entire year. We celebrated that victory by turning the cable back on! We went without cable for almost two years.
We also had Craigslist Christmases for the boys for a couple of years and Kelly and I have not bought each other a gift for Christmas or Birthdays since I can remember. We all get most of our clothes from Goodwill and Daryl thinks everyone only buys socks and underwear at Target. When we got him a new school outfit this year for Kindergarten it was like he saw the clothes at stores for the first time. :-)
We have always had the support of our friends and family on this journey. No one ever made fun of us or questioned our "cheapness!" For that, Thank You!
What we have accomplished hasn't sunk in yet. I still only spent $3 at Sonic for lunch today. I guess that's not so bad since the new goal is beefing up that Emergency Fund.
I hope others can get ideas or encouragement from us. We did it Honey, we doubted ourselves at different times, BUT WE DID IT!

We took a family picture this morning as the first day we woke up  with no debt!