Scrimping Success

Kb and I got married straight out of college. Some would frown upon the timing, but I wouldn't change it for the world. We are starting our lives with each other. Learning, making mistakes, and becoming real life adults, together.  We are depending on each other and God's grace, and we're confident that the love won't stop flowing.

However, an unfortunate by-product of getting married right out of college is that funds are a bit strapped. By Dave Ramsey's definition, we are flat broke. We have a heaping pile of student loan debt that rivals the Himalayas. Kb and I don't care for the feeling of being underneath it all. True to Dave Ramsey form, we are packing together a debt snowball and rolling it down the mountain. Or at least attempting to. It's a learning process, but I think we're doing pretty well.

Last month, we purchased a car with cash!  And in the last year, I kissed goodbye to my life savings, we saved our pennies, and we paid off about $25,000. We've got a long way to go, but it's all part of our adventure.

It's a game, of sorts. I enjoy the challenge of finding new ways to save money. It's kind of fun to see how little money we can spend each month on groceries. And everything else.

When we moved into our home, we faced the common dilemma of what to do with our trash. Growing up, my parents burned the burnable stuff and set out the non-burnable stuff in an orange bag by the side of the road. That orange bag? You've got to pay for them to come and take it away! Crazy.

We saw an opportunity to save some money. A benefit of living in the country is that you can burn trash. That's free so we do that. And we discovered that almost all of the trash that you can't burn, you can recycle. That's also free so we do that, too.  Never mind that recycling is good for the environment; it saves money!

But what about that 2.5% of trash that can't be recycled or burned? Well, we cheat a bit on that. About once a month we sneak a small bag of random trash into the dumpster at my mom's work.

I know.  Shameful.

Nonetheless, we're not giving that orange bag place any money to swipe our trash.

I call that a success.