Official Newspaper Route countdown - 10 days to go

That is pretty much our mantra right now. 10 more days, 10 more days, 10 more days. And after that, we get to go on an all expense paid 3 day trip to Chicago for Dave's BMW training/ my pampering. Woohoo! I'm looking forward to it, to say the least.

awellsnz, no, we did not pay off our home mortgage YET. I should say that we're debt free except for our home mortgage. Nevertheless, I'm excited. We paid off $38,503.77 in 9 months and 18 days. The debt included a student loan, a second mortgage on our home (a.k.a. credit card debt consolidated into a mortgage on our house), a credit card and loans from family members. As a result of Dave Ramsey inspiring us to think outside the box on making money, we were able to earn an additional $12,000 after taxes that we wouldn't have made otherwise. That helped a lot. And we sold $6,000 of stuff to pay off debt as well.

Also, I believe that you asked a while back if I had any tips on budgeting. Basically, we used the budgeting forms on daveramsey.com (his book, the Total Money Makeover is what really inspired us...) and the spreadsheet from joelmaxwell.com which is a file modeled on Dave Ramsey's forms and we also referenced the workbook, The Budget Kit.

Anyways, one of the most significant things we gathered from these sources was that you have to budget for all the non-monthly, yet predictable items such as haircuts, Christmas gifts, clothes, shoes, non-monthly insurance premiums, etc, etc, etc. You know these things will come about every year but they are not monthly bills that come to you to be paid. We would always try to live on a budget before but not account for these things then wonder why we always came up short. We'd add up our monthly bills, subtract that from our income and say, "Well, it looks like we're making plenty of money to pay these bills, why is it we never have any?"

link to Dave Ramsey's budget form: http://www.daveramsey.com/media/pdf/fpu_qbudget.pdf

Joel Maxwell's spreadsheet:
http://joelmaxwell.com/tools/

Anyways, I realized tonight that I haven't allowed myself to daydream in months. I would like to start again.