Balance

For me, I think the hardest thing about trying to pay off debt is finding a good balance. Dave Ramsey encourages his followers to become "gazelle intense" when they start paying off debt, meaning that they only spend money on the absolute essentials (food, shelter, utilities and basic clothing and necessities) and ALL extra money goes toward the debt. A lot of people would call this extreme, and maybe it is, but the fact is, it works. Clearly, the more money you put toward your debt, the faster you will pay it off and the sooner you will become debt free.

The difficulty is that when you live gazelle intense, life isn't very much fun sometimes. Don't get me wrong, you can have a good life without having to spend money all the time, but sometimes spending money can be fun too. Phil and I both really like to shop for two things: clothes, and things for our home. We don't care much about traveling or eating out. We don't buy many (if any) toys for Luke. We don't go to concerts, amusement parks or really anything else that costs money. But we do like to buy nice clothes and nice items for our home. I guess everyone has their thing, right?

So we have made a decision, and that is that we are still going to allow ourselves to buy a few new things for ourselves or our home here and there and we are NOT going to feel guilty about it.

The key to this is discussing it as a couple and having a budget. We have agreed that we both feel ok about setting a little (and I mean little) money aside in our budget each month for us to buy as we please. Talking about it first gets us on the same page and helps us to make sure that neither feel like the other is being unfair. We do want to pay off our debt as quickly as possible, but we also want to feel like its ok to buy something new once in a while without feeling like we have done something wrong.

Our "Home Improvement" budget will vary each month, so if there is something we really need, or want to try to get, we will see if we can work it into the budget when we do our planning. For our "Clothing" budget we have decided that each of us will get $50 a month, and it will roll over to the next month (so if I only spend $20 one month, I get the $30 I didn't spend, plus $50 more the following month).  We are even going to give Luke his own $10 a month clothing budget (not that he knows) because he needs a few new things too once in a while!

I think the key here is learning to be flexible and find a good balance. Not everyone is the same and so not everyone will define "gazelle intense" the same way that Dave Ramsey defines it. That doesn't matter. What really matters it working together for a common goal, and one day soon, achieving it.