Introduction!

[Meredith]

I have to thank Amy for the wonderful new site. I absolutely love it.

I love having a place to come and post/talk about debt, getting out of it, and staying far away from it. How many people do you know that actually say they enjoy talking about debt? Honestly, it's one of my favorite things since I've become obsessed with overcoming it.

We stumbled upon Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover back in the second half of 2005. We had been "fine" up until then. Everything was current. We had excellent credit. Never a late payment. Very smooth. Very "normal". But, I wondered what would happen if things suddenly weren't so smooth anymore. We had some money in savings that we considered our newly-named BEF and we dove right into the TMMO at Baby Step 2 in November 2005.

We had over $60,000 in debt (not including the house) at that point and were determined to get rid of it. We didn't sell anything major, but took a new look at all the "leaks" and random spending in our budget. We made it through BS2 and on Feb 24, 2007 we declared ourselves free.

By August 2007 we had saved our FFEF and were feeling on top of the world. We were getting somewhere and it seemed that it was happening fairly quickly. It's hard to realize that it took us two whole years to get to that point (but it was also ONLY two years, so we did great!)

Things changed a lot after that. In August 2007, DH lost his job and we found out we were expecting Baby #3. But, none of that was a crisis because we had worked the steps and we were in good shape.

Now we're looking forward to the arrival of #3 and then anticipating attacking the next Baby Steps with new energy!

[Meredith]

Thankfully we had a rather large shovel at the time. We just had to plug a lot of the leaks! We sold some things, but not any big money items. We stopped wasting and saved every penny possible. We really did get down to bare bones for a while. We were OK with that because we knew that "this too shall pass".

[Linda]

What an encouraging story! How did you pay it off? I can't do it with my 9-5 job, been looking for a part-time job but they don't pay too much and it is hard to find one that work around my full time job. I would prefer to make money online, I need to really make enough to make a dent in my bills!