The Buerglers

Some light reading while we're at the wedding today..... Several years ago I found myself knee deep in a pile of unexpected car accident bills: car insurance, health insurance, hospital stay, emergency room visit, x-rays, and ambulance ride. While trying to pay off this mounting pile of bills, I had my regular bills: car tire credit card, car payments, two student loans from a private university, a computer loan, phone bill, and a credit card on a church employee’s salary. Sound familiar? Just thinking about those days brings back a headache and night sweats. There is a certain amount of underlying stress that comes with being a “slave to the lender”.  See, when you’re paying off loans, cars, and credit cards your money isn’t really yours. The second you earn it, the second you pay your “master” aka the credit card company or the loan company.  You aren’t really FREE to do whatever you want with your money. Paying off debt, managing / reducing bills by living simply, and ...

Getting out of debt and having good money practices takes a lot of emotional and mental preparation.  By listening to TV, radio and Internet ads, we are constantly bombarded with financial myths, low-interest sales pitches, scarcity tactics, etc that are easy to buy into.  We did for years! Some of the emotional and mental tips we’re sharing come from Dave Ramsey, while some of the other come from other financial blogs GRS and SimpleDollar we read or from our own learning.  This isn’t a comprehensive list, just a few of the ones that really made an impact for us. Live Like No One Else so You Can Live Like No One Else :  Tattoo this to your forehead or monogram it on your wallet.  Remember every bit that you don’t spend now is only saving up for the future.  I know the future doesn’t seem real because it’s so far away / unknown, but I love knowing that at the very least we’ll be able to function for 6 months of one of us looses our job or becomes una...

Congratulations to Rebecca   for winning our Total Money Makeover & Workbook give away ! Please note I counted the comments from the bottom up because that is the order in which they post. Rebecca - send me an email with your address :) Congratulations!! PS: I hate to delay our follow up posts again, but we decided to celebrate a friends birthday at the Braves game last night.  Hopefully we can finish our posts (they're almost done!) tonight and get them up tomorrow and Thursday.

WE’RE DEBT FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Before you celebrate with us, make sure you've read Elizabeth's Story , Eric's Story , and How We Climbed Out of Debt . Two and a half years of gazelle-ish-like intensity + the few months prior as emotional primer and slowed spending, we made it!  We paid off over $50,000.  We have two car titles. Closed credit card accounts. Statements from one student loan (and one on the way!) with a $0.00 balance.  All our debt with Eric’s parents is paid off.  It’s. All. Gone. We also paid for my 3 semesters of grad school in cash.  Paid a second car accident in cash (it was minor compared to the first one).  Went to Nicaraga on a Mission Trip in cash.  Went on a 5 day Puerto Rican vacation in cash.  We’re up to date on medical expenses for the baby in cash.  All while squeezing in travel for weddings , babies, family reunions, half-marathons , mini-vacations and to see out of town friends...in cash! ...

Now that you’ve heard Elizabeth's and Eric's stories of how we got into debt, we want to share a bit of how we climbed our way out.... My (Elizabeth) story picks up with my car accident and piling up medical bills... I read a few basic money management books and learned how to cut every ounce of spending out of my “budget” (I use that term loosely at this stage of my life), cut all my bills down to their minimum payment and found ways to scrape together some big money and fast.  I called around for babysitting jobs, returned unworn things from my closet, and sold old books on Amazon.com. Funny how desperate times call for desperate measures.  I learned a lot in those months.  I learned how to negotiate car insurance and health insurance. I learned how to make sure the insurance and doctors were filing and billing correctly. I learned to ask for a reduced payment or a payment plan. All skills that have helped me be more careful and detail oriented with money now. The c...

Check out part one and our disclaimer... The title of this post may lead you to believe that I made nothing but mistakes in the past when it came to money.  On the contrary, I made a lot of “wise” decisions, but they could have been better.  Here’s how. I’ll start where everyone seems to start, once they become a real adult and enter the working world permanently.  When I graduated from college I had a small amount of debt owed to my parents.  Thanks to my parents, none of this was student loans.  What this debt was from was overspending on entertainment and food, which I’m sure everyone can relate to. The first 2 years of college, I would rack up small debts to my parents and pay them off with the money I earned in the summer, while earning a little extra for the upcoming year.  Then between junior year and senior year, instead of paying my parents off and saving up a little, two things changed.  First, I decided not to live on campus my seni...

As we approach our very first DEBT FREE FRIDAY, Eric and I wanted to reflect on our debt story.  How we (mostly, I) got in this mess, and how we got out.  It’s been a serious work in progress for about two and a half years, and with some decent, though not great, effort for about six months before. Back in January I wrote the quick version of our debt story as part of a post on why we live in an apartment. But because money management has been such a huge part of our relationship, we decided it’s worth the time to reflect on the whole story of how becoming debt free has changed who we are as people, how we make decisions, and how we plan for the future.   We hope to inspire and encourage you just as we have been by family, friends, and strangers.  We respect that there are thousands of families just in our city alone who are suffering way worse that we are, and are not trying to brag.  We also don’t want folks to feel sorry for us.  We just w...