What many people may have suspected for a long time was confirmed last week. My family is not normal.

We actually set a goal to be not normal and are very proud of it. We even celebrated the day it happened. I guess that makes us even more not normal.

What happened to relegate us to the not normal side of life?

On May 15, 2013, we became debt free, excluding our mortgage.

Two years ago, my wife and I were tired. We were tired of being an average American household with student loan debt, credit card debt and home equity loan debt. We were tired of just making monthly payments but never making much of a dent in our debt – often increasing it. We were tired of the financial conversations we had that led to frustration and fear and most often ended in an argument. Though I had gotten pretty good at the introductory-zero-percent-interest-credit-card-balance-transfer-offer shuffle, I was tired of trying to convince myself that by the end of the grace period we would have the balance paid off.

We were tired of drowning in debt.

So, on May 15, 2011, after reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, we decided that instead of hoping things would change in the future, we were going to make things change in the present. My wife and I, along with our kids, set out on a journey to become debt free. We cut up the credit cards. We began using cash for most of our purchases, though we still used our check cards.

Most importantly, we started to live on a written budget. Instead of running a report at the end of each month to find out where our money had gone (I am a Quicken nerd so everything we spend gets tracked), we sat down each month to decide where our money would go. If we did not have the money in the budget to buy something, we did not buy it. If we took in more money than we expected during a month or spent less than we had budgeted, we paid down our debt. In the past, we would always have been able to justify spending at least some of it – usually most of it – on something we thought we needed or deserved.

It was not easy. Early on, budget meetings could still be tense and we often had to have several meetings per month to rework the budget when unexpected expenses came up. Because we had the same goal, though, in time our budget meetings became less stressful and we were able to communicate much better regarding our financial situation.

The week before we made our last payment on our home equity loan, the last debt we needed to pay off, we were faced with an unexpected car repair bill. When I called my wife to tell her how much it was going to cost, she worriedly asked if it was going to delay us paying off our debt. I told her no. I reminded her car repairs happen and we had budgeted for them each month and whatever we didn’t spend went into our savings account. We had more than enough saved up, under car repairs, to pay the bill.

She said that was her moment of realization, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief, that our lives had changed.

So what is ahead for us? We will continue to live on a budget but the money left over at the end of the month will now go towards our savings, our retirement and other things we deem important. We will even start to budget money each month to go towards future vacations from which we will return home with only memories and not a credit card bill. We still need to pay off our mortgage, but because we no longer have a home equity loan, we will be able to get a much better rate and will be able to pay it off early.

What we are most excited about for the future, though, is knowing our children will experience living debt free and will hopefully continue to live debt free when they are on their own.

Oh, by the way, if you wondering how much we paid off, I will tell you, but I have to admit, I am proudly bragging a bit by sharing it. At the same time, I also want others in the same position to know becoming debt free is possible.

Drum roll please…. we paid off $57,626.65 in 24 months – exactly 731 days. But who’s counting?

We sure are!

P.S. If you are tired of being in debt, I strongly recommend reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and checking out the other programs he offers. The book gave us the framework and the tools to get out of the debt hole we had dug, though many find going to his Financial Peace University classes helps them stay accountable. I also listen to podcasts of The Dave Ramsey Show for encouragement and inspiration. Hearing other people’s stories about becoming debt free made me even more determined to become debt free.

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