In the Begining

We often have friends and family how we do it all on our budget so I decided I wanted to start this blog to share with others how to live great on a frugal budget and still live happy. Recently we decided that I needed to get a evening job to help pay down our credit debt because as soon as we can we want to be debt free. As of right now I can't even remember how much our debt is but we owe $20,000 (at least) in credit card debt and $99,000 on our house. We just bought our first family car, we will be turning in our leased mini van next month. My husband, Joe, found us a 2004 Stratus that has a few transmission problems for only $850 dollars. We figured out that by leasing another mini van that we would be paying about $6000 after 2 years and that just wasn't a wise decision for our family that is 10% of our yearly income and we just think we can find better ways to spend our money. I use coupons to make our grocery budget stretch to the limit and then some, our weekly grocery budget is $40 a week (7% of our annual income) and its definitly not much money to go on but we make it. Until January this year the money was always left up to my husband everything from earning it to spending it to paying bills (lol no, not in a crazy way) just I didn't have any worries and didn't realize how much in debt we were I mean he told me we owed a lot of money but I didn't realize until we sat down and he showed me our bills. So now we are a team, more of a team then before becuase now we are working together as a couple to take on our debt and our life's. Our family goal is to become debt free, and live not within our means but under them. This way we can save money for everything from cars, college, retirment, and anything else life might throw at us. We hope that by sharing our journey we help a few others out.