August 2019 Debt Update! Hi Everyone! So this post is going to be pretty short, but as promised we are keeping you all posted on our journey. As you guys know, one of the things that we are working on is getting out of A LOT of debt. With a cross country move, job changes, and everything else that comes along with these transitions, it has not been easy to stick to our financial plan. This has been ESPECIALLY hard on the days that we feel like we are going no where fast. I'm not going to type out all of the details for this months update. Instead, below I will share our complete "Debt Update" video, but before I do, I just want to leave you guys with a few positive notes incase you are in the thick of something too. Things we have learned through sharing our journey: 1.) If you are working toward some type of change in your life, don't give up!  We are learning that often times the process feels super slow, but if we are doing a little bit e......

As a lot of you guys know, Corey picked up an interesting hobby to make extra money when we moved back to Ohio.... THRIFTING. We've been trying to figure out a better name for it, but essentially, it involves buying random items from yard sales, thrift stores, etc., and re-selling them for profit. If you have a name idea for his fun new obsession, comment below! So obviously we are not the originators of this idea. People have been doing this for years, but Corey started watching videos of Gary Vaynerchuk promoting this idea and he decided to give it a try! I'll be completely honest, I was not on board at first. Like, at all.  I was not looking forward to spending ten minutes, let alone an hour or two yardsaling on the weekends. I had just spent a lot of my time on Allie Cassazza's course  on decluttering and I didn't want him bringing junk back into the house. All of that being said, there was some tension at the beginning, but after a few conversations, we......

As you probably know, Corey and I are moving our family from California, back to our home state of Ohio. I will continue to elaborate on the move and all of the details as they come.  For the background story, feel free to read my post titled " When Life Doesn't Go My Way, " but for now, I'd like to talk about our decision making process when determining whether to rent or buy. Previously when we lived in Ohio, we owned our home. It was nice knowing that our mortgage was going toward something rather than "being thrown away" each month on a rental. We got a decent deal on our home because we bought it as a foreclosure. This really worked out for us when we decided to unexpectedly move cross-country eight months after we bought our house. Thankfully, we were able to sell it for a decent amount more than we bought it for and we came out on top. When we moved to California, we quickly realized the market is a lot different than Ohio. Homes are way mor......

The numbers for January are finally in. I'm just going to be honest...they aren't pretty. So, we launched our blog (unofficially) at the end of December 2018, and with that came a lot of goals for us to work toward in 2019. While we knew what our January looked like, we were still hopeful that even with our chaotic schedule, we'd some how be able to magically pull off getting rid of some debt. As we said, this is our "Highlight REAL," so with that, we have promised ourselves to share the good, the bad, and the ugly. We quickly went into January with no game plan. We spent the first 9 days on vacation in Orlando at Disney and Universal. We then came back and had our best friends come in from out of town, so we were out doing a lot of fun stuff (some of which required more spending than normal) Finally, we made the decision to move back to Ohio, and so we spent the last few days of the month packing and moving into our temporary house for the nex......

I've restarted this post about 5 times now, and what I've come to realize is that it doesn't matter which way I flip it....the coin still isn't mine because we are in some massive debt. $121,323.07 to be exact. You think that number is big? That isn't even our highest. At one point, we were $134,000.00 in debt with a $150,000.00 mortgage to pile on top of that. We sold our house and began renting when we moved to California, which did help make the number shrink, but I digress. Here we are at $121,323.07. Over the years, we've had phases where we've aggressively chiseled away at the mountain of despair that we owe. We've also had some phases where the payoff wasn't really our priority, so we passively made the minimum payments. I'd say more recently, we've been taking the passive approach, and trying to ignore the fact that, well, we are majorly in the hole. But here's the truth: Whether we igno......