Money Talk Part II: Thank You!

Seriously, you guys...I am overwhelmed with how many of you left such thoughtful, helpful, and honest comments on yesterdays post. I was so worried about writing about such a "taboo" (one of you used that word!) subject. I was afraid you would take one look at the subject line and think how I shouldn't talk about that and that it's none of my business. Because, well, it's not!

I would never ask somebody how much they make, how much they payed for such and such  (big things like houses), how much debt they have, etc. because I know it makes almost everybody uncomfortable to talk about it. But I felt like my blog would be a safe place for me to write about it. I have wanted to get others opinions and experiences on this for a while now and now that I did, I feel so much less alone! I'm in the "same boat" as many of you.

I'm proud to say that even though we do have debt (no numbers will be posted here), the credit card is no longer being used and is just being slowly paid off. Our one car payment is slowly being paid as well as our mortgage but like many of you said, those are good and necessary debts. We learned from our mistakes and are now on our way to being debt free.

In our defense, we got married very young (I was 20 and he was 22), bought a house after less than three years of marriage, and then the bank made a mistake with our escrow so we ended up having to pay a lot more monthly on our mortgage than we had planned on. We had to use our credit card to pay for some bills because of that. We just payed that off so now we will be living within our means again. Hallelujah!

Alright, enough money talk from me for a while! Thank you again for being such awesome friends!

Money Isn't The Most Important Thing- But It Is Important

I don't know about you, but finances is often a topic of discussion in our home. Not enough money, too many bills, need more money, how can we save more money, money this, money that, etc, etc. Money isn't a topic many of us enjoy (unless maybe you have it and in that case- I accept donations, lol). We don't talk about how much debt we have if we have it because we are embarrassed  Debt, to me, means we were stupid. We have made mistakes with our money. We have learned from those mistakes and are now digging ourselves out of that pit. We are slowly making an upward climb and that is all we can really do.


Is it A LOT? No. We don't have student debt. We do have a mortgage, car payments, and a credit card that we are paying off. I know these are hard times. A lot of people have debt so I shouldn't be so embarrassed to talk about it. I think my embarrassment is mostly because I was raised by parents who taught me to save, save, save. They are smart with their money and have been able to buy their cars without taking out loans. They took us on family vacations, we were in sports, took music lessons, etc. These are all things I thought were normal and attainable for everyone. This is what I want for our kids too. But not all of us are wealthy and so we need to learn how to be smart with the money we do have.

I find myself wondering how much debt other people have. How do we compare to everyone else? I mentioned this topic on Twitter and a couple of you suggested that I write a post about it. I'm nervous to post this but I'm hoping that by opening myself up to talking about this, some of you will too.

If you feel comfortable with leaving a comment (even if it's anonymously) to share how you feel about this, I would love to hear it. How much debt do you have, if any?