No Debt

Let me preface that this is not one of those self-help posts like "Get through College without paying interest"  or "You can get out of debt." Also let it be known that we only have our undergraduate degrees which is a lot easier to get out of debt than any higher education. Especially when scholarships and financial aid are much easier to come by with the lower level of education. We don't want I mostly just want to have a record of some of our personal situations and choices that let us be debt free. 

First off, we chose schools that give a great education for a relatively low price. I started with a year at Portland Community College while living at home and working to save up for BYU-Idaho. I drove school buses right out of high school which allowed flexibility with my class schedule as well as a relatively high paying job for someone right out of high school. Later Max and I both went to BYU . Then Max transferred to UVU and it would have been extremely expensive but because we had been in Utah so long, we were able to claim residency and it ended up being about the same price as BYU.

We made sure we applied for grants for school. We were allotted a decent amount before marriage but got a whole bunch more after marriage. So I guess the moral of that is to marry young and poor and you will get more money from the government. Not the perfect system, but it worked for us. Even with the grants and our income from Max's summer sales we still ended up racking up 17,000 dollars in student loans. part was from Max immediately starting school post mission and also our last year when we had to do our internships during the summer and couldn't work. 

I was eligible for a scholarship from BYU my last year, so that helped.

We never worked during the school year, if we had, we probably would have had less debt but I also think that could have jipped us of some education. I don't know how people work and keep up in their classes. Hats off to those that do! 

We knew from the beginning that we were going to be doing this on our own without financial help from our parents (as many students do, especially married ones) so he had to save our money appropriately.

Clark Pest control was an awesome sales company to work for. You always hear of summer sales companies scamming their employees but this company was real and honest and very generous to their employees. It is because of this company, along with Max's really hard work and long hours that we were able to earn so much, it is also from this company that we were able to have a Mini Cooper to use as a second car for a period of time, it is also from this company that Max won a moped which saved us during our year of different schools and different internships.

 

Some of these are huge blessings that you can't really plan for, but I know we were blessed for Max's diligence and hard work.  

We made it a goal that we at least wanted me to finish college before we purchased a second car. There were times when we really wanted to get a second car and started shopping around but Max continued to use the moped even in the cold dead Utah winter. 

We have also been blessed with only needing to pay rent 16 out of the 45 months we have been married (yes I did just calculate how many months we've been married ) This is due to circumstance and is another blessing you can't plan for. We never had to pay rent during the summers when we worked for Clark because Max would always meet his sales quota. When we moved back to Oregon we were able to live in and take care of Max's uncle's house while he was doing a second retirement in central Oregon. After our last summer in California we came back to take care of Max's grandma's property by exchanging TONS of labor for rent. Out of the 16 months of paying rent, 8 were spent by paying $375 for a tiny basement apartment in a kind of scary neighborhood. That was one of the sacrifices we made to make college more 

affordable, looking back we have a lot of great memories there. 

Choices

Everybody spends money differently and live different lifestyles. There are tons of right ways to use money and tons of wrong ways. These are some things that worked for us when trying to stay frugal but I just want to emphasize that we don't think people that choose to live with things that we choose to live without are bad! Everyone has their priorities and needs...

We've survived with one car for quite awhile. We're not sure how much longer this will work for us but we are happy that we've never had to deal with car payments.

We will only use credit cards if we know we have money in the bank to pay it off. We do not believe in paying interest to the credit card company. They don't deserve it!

 We shop around a ton for larger purchases We finally made our first big furniture purchase...A couch! In the meantime we survived with a camping couch and an ugly free couch. We don't believe in paying interest on furniture either. Homes, school, and cars are really the only things in our book that deserve to have a little interest paid on them.

He have become expert garage/estate salers We found our amazing dining room set, desk, lamp, mirror, projector and so much more for tiny prices.

We don't spend money on things we feel we don't need. For example, we decided not to get a crib and that Charlie would be just fine in a pack n play, we also didn't do anything to make his nursery cute, even though we kind of wanted to, but he doesn't care one bit! His dresser and changing table were purchased for about 90% off. He has received the majority of his clothes through hand-me-downs, a big thanks to Natalie and Lisa! Anything I have purchased is usually from a consignment store. 

 

We set goals such as we only eat out once a month. We haven't always followed this rule and we haven't gone out to eat every month either

We set a family budget for gifts at Christmas. 

When I became pregnant with Charlie we ended up using medicaid for our insurance in both Utah and Oregon. I know this can be a controversial topic but overall we felt it was the best for our family and that we were not abusing the system seeing as it is to help poor to get ahead and us being college students, we definitely fit that description. We have a different perspective now and we can never gripe about the portion of our future paychecks that go to medicare because we know how beneficial it has been to us. 

The student Loans: We only accepted subsidized student loans which meant we didn't have to start paying interest on them until 6 months after we graduated. All the loans were under Max's name because he was planning on graduating after me. So we had the goal to pay them off before any interest started accruing. 

Last summer we decided to work for Clark Pest Control for the very last time seeing as there were no promising fire jobs in the near future and we could take this opportunity to completely pay off our debt before Max even graduated. Max has always been successful as a salesman so we decided that we would divide up the amount owed by his eight paychecks he would receive and pay that amount off with each paycheck so the loan would be gone by the end of the summer and we did it! We didn't come home from California super rich but the money we had was ours, not borrowed. We don't like being in any kind of debt so this felt good!