EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Guess what! We actually have some news!

So, we got the "we-need-to-move-out-on-our-own" bug a while back, but at the time we were planning on going on a two-year apprenticeship in Fall 2009, and didn't have a good income, so we figured we just had to be content for the time being.

Well, we found jobs (finally) and also joined a group in Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University (which some friends from church talked us into. I mention both together, because they worked together to produce a new direction for our immediate lives.

The Dave Ramsey class has actually been a very helpful thing for us. It's helping us learn to better manage our finances (which is important at this point, so we don't screw up our future finances). One of the biggest impacts that it has had on us was to encourage us into a new path than what we had planned out.

One of Dave Ramsey's financial tools is called the debt snowball. Basically, you work on paying the minimum payments for all your debts, and figure out how much extra you can pay per month. You pay the minimum payments on all debts, but put all the extra you can into the smallest debt. Then, once that's paid off, you move that same amount of money to the next smallest, and thereby cause a "snowball".

The important effect of this debt snowball idea was that we realized that with $400 a month above the minimum payments, we can be rid of our student debts in 6 years or less. So, we talked it over and decided that it would be more financially responsible to get rid of our debts first, then look at going to the mission field. That way, we have to raise less money for funding, and we have a few years to grow and mature.

So, once we decided we were going to pay off our loans first, we also got a much stronger drive to move out of the parents' house. We realized we were able to afford it, and went apartment shopping. Today we signed the application (not the lease) and are waiting for approval (which we're not too worried about). We actually even got to use a bit of Dave Ramsey's teachings in the process. Dave says that one important thing to do is bargain. So we offered to pay the first three months rent upfront (upon signing the lease), and got a bit more of a discount than they were already offering. Yay! If all goes well, then we'll be moving into our own apartment on Nov. 1.