I’ll start off by saying that I am NOT a financial whiz by any means, nor do I have any background in it, but I LOVE talking about finance, specifically budgeting, financial planning, retirement etc. It wasn’t always this way and I wish that I could go back in time to my younger self and convince that party girl to save even 25% of what she was making but alas you can only look onwards and upwards. That’s not to say I was bad with money, I just liked spending it but luckily I never racked up a high visa bill or anything. Even with my parents paying for University and College (yes I’m aware of how lucky I am), I always worked 1 or 2 jobs to support my lifestyle. It also helped that my Dad is an accountant and instilled a very hard work ethic in me right from the start. He was also the one who encouraged me to start an RRSP when I finished school so I did have a bit of a head start there. Before we got married, my husband and I combined our finances and opened up a joint account together. I also took on his student debts to his parents which was about $20,000. People always ask me why I did that even though it wasn’t my debt, but in my mind once we became Husband and Wife we became one and would take on anything and everything together. The year after we married we both worked 2 jobs in order to pay the debt off (it felt so good giving his parents a check for $10,000 — owing anyone, especially family money is a terrible feeling) and put down approximately 13% for our down payment of our new home. Overall, we were in a pretty good spot thanks to hard work and dedication.

It wasn’t easy but we knew it was something we wanted. How did we become so focused on finance and budgeting you ask? Well we owe everything to Dave Ramsey (we’re BIG fans of his and will refer to him often) and his book The Total Money Makeover. For those of you who are new to the finance game or feeling like you’re drowning, I highly recommend you get this book; it will change your life if you let it, I promise you. What we loved about Dave Ramsey’s plan was that he didn’t care how much trouble you were in, how you got there, where you were from etc, he just wanted you to start the journey and succeed. In order to help you succeed, he set up 7 Baby Steps to help you get there which I’ll go into detail in another post but trust me when I say it’s a great program. I will be honest and say we don’t follow his baby steps exactly by the book but in general we try and follow his teachings and so far they’ve worked. We also joined the #DebtFreeCommunity on Instagram and I can honestly say I’ve met some of the most supportive people I’ve ever met through that community. Everyone is on the same journey and knows what you’re going through and are just such great cheerleaders! They also inspire you to be better and keep going and I can attribute a lot of our success to them! For example, it was because of that community that we decided to bite the bullet and pay the $4,800 in order to pay our car off early! Now we only have our van to pay off and then we’ll be debt free! We’re hoping to be Debt Free by January 2021 but we’ll see what happens!

Honestly, this was the page I was most excited about when it came to starting this blog. I feel like so many people in my generation don’t know anything about personal finance or choose to ignore it because we were never taught about it and it just seems like this big scary thing, but it’s really not. It’s something we can’t afford to ignore as debts continue to rise and people are suffering all around us. Don’t even get me started on retirement planning as I can safely say many people in my generation have not given it a 2^nd thought even though now is the time to start planning for it—time and compounding interest is our friend people!! So basically I’m going to use this page to discuss any financial tips that have helped us and hope that it helps you too!

Ps the picture is right after we bought our house on the plot of land we had picked! We were such babies!!