We Own Our House!

The outside of our house with our wedding sign, the tree we got as a housewarming gift, and the tree we planted when we moved in :-)

 It's hard to believe that just over two years ago we were renters of a tiny bungalow in West Midtown. We had rented the house after we got engaged and Eric moved in right away while I waited until after the wedding. It was an old house and in terrible repair but we thought it was perfect for a young couple just starting out.

We went on our honeymoon about a month after the wedding and returned home in the midst of an ice storm to find that our rental had been put up for sale, no one had even bothered to tell us! It was a little unnerving to think that the place we called home could be taken away from us just like that and it was then that we started to think about buying a place (prior to this we had no interest in buying a house, it was the furthest thing from our minds).

Over Christmas we happened upon a house that had gone up for sale in my parents neighborhood, the same neighborhood I had grown up in. We went inside to check it out and were instantly in love with the high ceilings and massive windows. We made an offer and by February of 2011 we had closed on the house.

The house quickly became a home and as part of our financial plan we put as much extra money on our mortgage as we could. We already had a 15 year mortgage instead of the standard 30 and the house was pretty cheap to begin with so it wasn't long until owning the house free and clear became a very achievable goal. Well, last week we made the final payment and we finally own our house for real! This is such an amazing feeling, I'm still in shock over it.

The people we dealt with at the bank kept saying, "congratulations! When will you be moving to a bigger house?". Seriously? Is this what people do? We just paid off this house. A large part of building life long wealth is not buying junk you don't need. Not only do we not need a bigger house but we love the house we have. We've been a young married couple here and brought home our first baby to it's walls. We are pleased as punch to live here and even happier to be full, official owners (not to mention completely free of debt). Naturally we went out for Pizza to celebrate :-)

Celebratory pizza at Marietta Pizza company, our favorite pizza joint!

 Now that we won't be making house payments any more (woo hoo!) here are the next steps in our life long money saving plans.

1. Invest! This isn't really my forte but Eric does a lot of research on the topic and is excited to start investing. We are still young enough to be able to invest without too much worry and plan to start with moderate to low risk investments.

2. Save for retirement. We are both guilty of not contributing to our 401ks as of late. We plan to start putting at least a little away for retirement.

3. House projects. Our house being so cheap was great for us but it means there are still a lot of things to fix and improve around here. We plan to take some of the money we would used for house payments and use it for house improvements instead.

4. Start a travel fund. This one is certainly more important to me than to Eric but I really want to set aside a little bit for travel and vacations.  

5. Continue to live frugally and accumulate wealth. That one speaks for itself. Since we started making an effort to live frugal and save more money we have been more and more satisfied with our quality of live. We plan to continue to look for new ways to save money and to love the things we have instead of lusting after new stuff.

Eating Healthy On The Cheap

Photo courtesy of Fresh Market 

So as usual many of my New Years resolutions have to do with food and health and generally eating in a better, more responsible manner.  I also want to stick to our money saving goals which we have continued to do pretty well on in spite of the holidays (although we did see an increase in spending last month as we expected we would). With these goals in mind I signed up for weekly special emails from some of the healthier stores nearby. In particular I want to eat better quality meat and dairy in the coming year but as most of you know this can be really expensive.

So I signed up for newsletters for Harry's Farmers Market, Whole Foods and Fresh Market to get notifications of weekly deals and specials and today I took advantage of some of these savings. I was so excited by this that I wanted to share it on my blog :-) Fresh market in particular has amazing Tuesday deals and that's where I went today. I normally don't shop at Fresh Market because they are SUPER expensive but to my surprise their Tuesday deals were incredible! I got organic, hormone free chicken and ground beef for $2.99 a lb and with the way we have cut back on meat consumption a pound of meat will last us 3 or 4 meals easily. They also had a great deal on milk but I didn't need any at the moment so I passed on that one for now. I can't wait to see what the special is next Tuesday!

I haven't taken advantage of any of the deals at Harry's or Whole foods yet because I'm waiting for the right items to go on sale but I have high hopes for these as well. If you are looking to save money but still eat quality foods I highly recommend keeping track the specials at these places. I have been amazed at the deals you can get. One word of caution though. The stores are trying to lure you in with the specials and then entice you to buy all their other beautiful, expensive items. You must resist and only buy the things that are on sale for crazy cheap. Stick to what you went there for and you'll be good to go.

Getting our Financial House in order

We have been doing quite a lot of thinking about, strategizing and rearranging how we handle our finances over the past few months. It all started with Eric's discovery of a financial blog that really clicked for him called Mr. Money Mustache. The blog is all about achieving financial independence and retiring early. By retiring I don't really mean staying at home and doing nothing, it's more about being able to do something you enjoy, work from home and work on a part time basis. This would be the ultimate goal for both Eric and I, especially now that we have a kid on the way. It's extremely important that at least one of us is at home full time because we plan to home school but having both parents at home would be ideal.

Of course if both us stay home we need to have some money to live on so that's where the Mr. Money Mustache strategy comes in. It appeals to me because instead of sticking to a budget (which makes me feel deprived) it's just about developing new habits. Here are the steps we are taking to try to save some major money and retire early.

1. Paying attention to where our money goes. This is probably a common sense thing that everyone should be doing but that I haven't really started being hard core about until lately. Eric and I sat down together, went through our Mint.com account and saw exactly what we were spending our money on. This showed us where we could easily cut back. Luckily Eric and I are both naturally thrifty so we were encouraged by how much we were already saving without even trying, there were obviously areas we could improve on though.

2. Reevaluating the way we eat. This is huge for us. When we looked at where our money went food was by far our biggest spending category. Groceries were actually number one and eating out was probably number two. We've instigated a lot of changes in this area of our lives and are seeing huge results already. Eric has been eating a low carb diet on and off for a few years now. Spending all that money on meat was the number one reason that we were losing so much money to the grocery store. I have been wanted to cut back my meat intake for a while now anyway because of ethical reasons and Eric agreed to try alternative dieting methods such as portion control to maintain his health. I'm pretty happy about this change, I get to eat beans and corn again! We are still trying to limit our use of refined white flour and things like that. However cutting back on meat and using things like beans and cheese as alternate sources of protein make it so much easier to buy in bulk and save huge amounts of money. We still have meat probably two or three times a week so we haven't cut it out completely, but just cutting way back has made a gigantic difference in our spending. Eric has also stopped eating out for lunches and will take leftovers or take advantage of free snacks provided by his workplace during the week. We still go out to dinner for the occasional treat but our day to day way of eating has changed and we are both really happy with it.

3. No more big banks. We finally ditched our Wells Fargo accounts this weekend and switched everything over to ING. We had already opened a savings account with ING and when Wells Fargo started charging crazy, random fees for things we decided it was time to make a permanent switch. It took a while to get everything changed over because we had so many things automatically coming out of the Wells Fargo account but it was so worth it. Not only are we getting way better interest rates but we can do all our banking electronically which we love. If electronic banking isn't your thing you can always use a credit union which are also way better than the large banks, there is no way I'm jumping through all those hoops to avoid paying fees just to have a checking account, it's nuts!

4. Rewards credit cards. I am a huge fan of rewards credit cards. As long as it is money you are going to be spending anyway you might as well be getting something back for it right? When I first started using credit cards I wasn't sure I could keep track of everything so I would just use it for gas. That way it was easy to manage and I knew I could pay it off each month. Now that I'm more confident with credit card use I put everything on a rewards card and pay the whole balance off every month. Obviously it's important not to carry a balance on credit cards but as long as you can pay it off each month you might as well take advantage of those rewards. We love our Chase Freedom card because you get 1% back on all your purchases plus you get 5% back on certain categories that change every three months. This quarter it is gas and restaurants so we are wracking up rewards like crazy!

5. Paying down the mortgage. We are planning to pay down our mortgage as soon as possible to avoid paying interest on our loan. Once we get that paid off we will be 100% debt free and our cost of living will be minimal. We live in unincorporated Cobb County so our taxes are very low and once we don't have that monthly mortgage payment we will be saving some serious cash each month. We already had a 15 year mortgage which much shorter than what most people have but we have also probably paid about $20,000 extra on the mortgage in the past year. If we continue at this rate we will have it paid off in no time and can put that money to better use.

6. Buying used. This one is really for me since I do most of the shopping in our family. It's a little hard for me because sometimes I want nice, new things. However I am learning to love consignment and thrift stores and it's been pretty amazing some of the great finds you can score if you take the time to look. It's worked out especially well for baby shopping. Consignment stores are full of brand new and practically brand new (seriously, some of them still have the tags on them) designer baby clothes for super cheap! Sure it takes more time to dig through everything and find the really good deals, but if you think of it as a game it's kind of fun.

7. Learning to love what we have. This one is hard for me too. It's so much a part of our culture to want the next, great thing. we are trying to appreciate the great things we have and take pleasure in the beauty of our home without craving more stuff.

So this is where we are starting. So far it has been fairly painless and the results we are seeing are big! It's certainly satisfying watch our money grow but we don't want to be crazy strict about it either. It's all about balance (as with everything in life). It will be interesting to see how having baby Echo join our family will affect our finances and whether or not we can keep it up. Wish us luck!