I needed someone who had time to see 5-10 houses a day (at least until we saw all the inventory which didn’t take long in this small town) because we had a huge time crunch. We also had someone who had lived in the area all her life and that helped a lot. She wasn’t super experienced but the agency as a whole was and…

That makes more sense. I was going to say as a seller you kind of need to have already moved out by then!

I didn’t make a strange choice. I didn’t have a ton of money sitting around instead of paying off credit cards. I had 125/mo plus any windfalls that I was saving as an emergency fund in case we screwed up our super tight budget or had an emergency which did happened and I used it a couple of times. I had some cash…

Of course! You have to worry about worst case scenario first. That’s just good instincts. :)

If it’s something you can buy yourself it wouldn’t be an issue. Like someone could really have a hankering for an American only snack that you can buy before you leave for them.

When I experience true joy in my youth it was followed by deep agony. I’m okay with just being level these days. That was a rough ride in my youth. I’m rediscovering what joy can mean in a more level way than before. It turns out I was always partially practicing Stoiscm as was my nature but getting more into it,…

Works for me. Assume nothing and be delighted by the small things that go right.

I don’t get your point here. Of course if I hadn’t used my credit cards in the first place to over spend I wouldn’t have spent as much in interest. But I did and all I was trying to do was explain how I got out of that debt by no longer using them and using that payment method that I explained. Now I pay the…

Good thing you’re dealing with this now instead of decades later. I wish we did this a year after getting married instead of 7 years later but we also did a justice of the peace thing and spent almost nothing on our “wedding”. But we probably spent way more than that on junk in 7 years so you’re probably ahead of us…

That’s a tricky situation. I found that tracking (via excel files) what we spent. Then also making an excel file for each of our debts and factoring in interest and payments into the future (till its paid given what we were paying on them and not adding to them) which allowed us to see how increasing our payments…

It’s good that you still saved money in the beginning of the year. Life hitting you with unexpected bills is what saving is for. Good luck this year!

Awesome! Last year we saved our cash gifts for both our birthdays and Christmas and used that to help pay off our credit cards early as a Christmas gift to ourselves (along with 125/month we saved up). Honestly the best gift we ever gave ourselves.

That’s the ideal way to use credit cards but sadly not everyone is at the point where they can do that. Knowing this formula really helped me in calculating payoff dates and moving them closer since it allowed me to stay motivated and even got me to pay more off because I could see how that affected the payoff date in…

Mrmoneymustache.com says that a lot. Like your head is on fire emergency.

Track your progress or success in a visual way. I also prefer a medium that allows me to change variables and see how that can affect projected success or progress.

I did a weird version of the highest interest one. But after I wrote all that follows the real thing I did was make excel files that allowed me to change out payments and see how that would change our payoff dates. Whatever you do, track, project, and play with the numbers and that can give you a lot of motivation…

I don’t know why cash gifts became bad. Cash is awesome. It only gets weird if you both try to give cash.

Nothing weird. It’s the stupid small ones that go into fans that are super delicate and just can’t handle regular use. And every 8 months to a year I have to deal with them. It’s a pain in the butt because I can never remember to get them and when I do I forget the size. So I go about a month with usually 2 shot…

Who cares? My time is better used not having to replace bulbs all the time. Almost yearly I have to change the stupid bulbs in the light portion of the fan in my old apartment and there were about 5 of them. But I usually had to remember to buy the stupid things which I never remembered to get while out and I don’t…

We are beyond using the 52 week challenge at this point but I agree that it is great for people trying to get control of their finances. So it’s a great group one. I’ll just do last years list again as I can.