Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to read our blog. Before we dive into the hard numbers, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little.
Nicole and I met in high school through mutual friends and have been together ever since,. In fact, today marks 10 years since we started dating! We continued our relationship through college, and got married two weeks after I graduated.
She graduated a year ahead of me and that really helped us starting out. Nicole was able to pay off a tiny bit of her student loans and pay down her car loan enough that we were able to pay off the last $2,000 with money from our wedding. Being the more fiscally disciplined one, Nicole kept us on track early on when she was working and I hadn’t found a job yet. During that time I started picking up cooking and computer programing, both of which helped us with getting our finances in order. We were in a small, economically-depressed city near where we grew up and went to college, and her $36,000 salary was not going to be enough as we had student loans starting to come into repayment and I hadn’t found a job yet.
About three months after we got married, I got a job offer in my field in another state. We packed up and moved so I could take an entry-level job making barely more than she made before, but there was room for advancement and it was in a large enough city that Nicole could find better-paying work as well.
Just about two months after moving, and before Nicole had found a new job, we found out she was pregnant. After going through the initial phases of terror, excitement, panic, and joy, we tightened our belts a little more and started saving. Not long at all after that, she got an offer to work as a financial analyst, and we started to see that we were going to be just fine. We did our best to live on just one of our salaries, while we used the other to start paying off debt and saving so she could take 12 weeks off of work to be home with the baby. This undoubtedly changed our plans to pay off our student debt before having kids, but we couldn’t possibly be happier than we are having our little daughter join our family.
I can’t say that we’ve been perfect in our management of our finances, and I’ll even talk about some of the dumber things I’ve done in some future posts. What I can say is that we spend every dollar intentionally, making sure that we make the most of what we have and keep our priorities in line. We try to be generous with our money, avoid impulse spending, and prioritize where we put any extra we’re able to squeeze out.
The reason we’re doing all of this is to keep money from being a limiting factor in our life goals, and having more money should never be a goal in itself. We want to be free of debt, so that our money is ours to decide how to use. We want to be generous and have a positive impact on those around us, so we aim to have extra money in the budget to help whenever we see a need arise in our community. We want to be less-reliant on full-time work, so that Nicole can stay home with our kid(s) if she wants to at least part-time. And finally, we want to be able to actually retire at a reasonable age.
In our next post, we’ll talk a little bit about where we stand today and translate this whole story into some hard numbers.
Starting Out Together
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Welcome! Thanks for taking the time to read our blog. Before we dive into the hard numbers, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little.
Nicole and I met in high school through mutual friends and have been together ever since,. In fact, today marks 10 years since we started dating! We continued our relationship through college, and got married two weeks after I graduated.
She graduated a year ahead of me and that really helped us starting out. Nicole was able to pay off a tiny bit of her student loans and pay down her car loan enough that we were able to pay off the last $2,000 with money from our wedding. Being the more fiscally disciplined one, Nicole kept us on track early on when she was working and I hadn’t found a job yet. During that time I started picking up cooking and computer programing, both of which helped us with getting our finances in order. We were in a small, economically-depressed city near where we grew up and went to college, and her $36,000 salary was not going to be enough as we had student loans starting to come into repayment and I hadn’t found a job yet.
About three months after we got married, I got a job offer in my field in another state. We packed up and moved so I could take an entry-level job making barely more than she made before, but there was room for advancement and it was in a large enough city that Nicole could find better-paying work as well.
Just about two months after moving, and before Nicole had found a new job, we found out she was pregnant. After going through the initial phases of terror, excitement, panic, and joy, we tightened our belts a little more and started saving. Not long at all after that, she got an offer to work as a financial analyst, and we started to see that we were going to be just fine. We did our best to live on just one of our salaries, while we used the other to start paying off debt and saving so she could take 12 weeks off of work to be home with the baby. This undoubtedly changed our plans to pay off our student debt before having kids, but we couldn’t possibly be happier than we are having our little daughter join our family.
I can’t say that we’ve been perfect in our management of our finances, and I’ll even talk about some of the dumber things I’ve done in some future posts. What I can say is that we spend every dollar intentionally, making sure that we make the most of what we have and keep our priorities in line. We try to be generous with our money, avoid impulse spending, and prioritize where we put any extra we’re able to squeeze out.
The reason we’re doing all of this is to keep money from being a limiting factor in our life goals, and having more money should never be a goal in itself. We want to be free of debt, so that our money is ours to decide how to use. We want to be generous and have a positive impact on those around us, so we aim to have extra money in the budget to help whenever we see a need arise in our community. We want to be less-reliant on full-time work, so that Nicole can stay home with our kid(s) if she wants to at least part-time. And finally, we want to be able to actually retire at a reasonable age.
In our next post, we’ll talk a little bit about where we stand today and translate this whole story into some hard numbers.
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