Money Saving Mom®

As you well know, our family has become big fans of You Need a Budget over the past year.

YNAB aims to be a different kind of budgeting software — one that will help you break the paycheck to paycheck cycle, get out of debt and save money, and ultimately help you live the kind of life you want.

When I shared earlier last year about how much we love this software, I was so happy to hear how many of you also loved YNAB. We recently partnered with YNAB to offer $100 Amazon gift cards to the top success stories we received from readers about how YNAB has changed your life.

We received so many wonderful success stories and it was hard to choose just a few to share here! Thank you to everyone who submitted entries! (The winners have now been contacted, and we will be posting the winning success stories over the next few weeks for all of you to read and be encouraged by.)

Here’s the second winning post…

How a Budget Changed Our Lives

Guest post written by Jennifer

By the time my husband and I were 28, we had amassed over $325,000 in educational debt.

We were in a terrible financial position. All I knew how to do was worry, and I spent hours obsessively thinking about the staggering minimum payments. All my husband knew how to do was ignore our debt. He wanted to pay the minimum payments and enjoy our income. We didn’t even know the exact amount of our debt. Honestly, we didn’t want to know!

Against this backdrop, I learned about YNAB online and practically forced my husband to give it a try. He didn’t want a budget, but I convinced him that we had to start dealing with our debt — especially since we were hoping to start a family.

Our first month on YNAB was March 2009 and, almost 7 years later, my husband and I agree: YNAB changed our life! Here’s how…

1. When we work together to allocate our monthly income towards our monthly expenses, we increase our peace and strengthen our marriage.

Using YNAB, we allocated our past month’s income into different budgeting categories. Before YNAB, I had worried about all the money we spent and my husband had resented my negativity and interference with our spending.

Our first monthly budgeting meeting was rough. In fact, for many, many months, I cried at every budgeting meeting as my husband and I struggled to understand our different hopes, fears, and desires involving our money and the ways we could use it.

But, ever so slowly, we came together as a couple and learned how to enjoy spending the fruits of our labors — whether paying down debt or doing something more fun. He wasn’t upset that I wanted to pay off debt, because we had budgeted together for it. I wasn’t anxious that he wanted to go to the movies or out to eat, provided we had funds in our entertainment budget for the month. All purchases were equal because they were how we had decided to spend our income.

2. When every dollar has a job, our income can accomplish amazing things!

YNAB sets it up so that every bit of your income has a job, whether paying down a debt, buying groceries, or setting aside money for irregular expenses. When we consciously decided how to spend our income, we were able to work toward our long-term and short-term goals every month, and to adapt as our goals changed.

Some of our budgeting accomplishments of the last 6 years include:

• Paying off private loans totaling $80,000.
• Allocating about 40% of our income to debt repayment even as our family has grown.
• Saving $22,000 for a down-payment on a house.
• Overhauling our lifestyle and budget to live on one income (about as much as the median U.S. household income) so I can stay at home while still paying down debt.
• Paying cash for a vinyl privacy fence, plumbing work, laptop, oil tank, refrigerator, chest freezer, washer and dryer, and two homebirths.
• Saving all year for periodic expenses like insurance, Christmas gifts, family camping vacation, heating oil, and bulk food purchases.
• Saving $9000 in our current efforts to pay cash for a used van to replace our 15-year-old car (our only vehicle).

3. When we record every dollar spent, we are grateful.

Entering every single purchase into our budget was not easy at first, but it was worth it. This practice forced us to look at everything from the smallest cup of coffee to the largest home repair and ask ourselves if it represented our priorities and values — what we wanted to do and who we wanted to be.

And when we reflected monthly on these priorities and values, we began to explore our real purpose in life, asking ourselves “What does it mean to us to live a good life?” In this light, every choice to spend our money one way and not another could be an expression of our hopes and dreams and was not as much of a sacrifice. Of course, there have been tears over high car repair bills or frustration over priorities that conflict. But, generally, a deeper joy and a gratitude for our income generally prevails, because that income provides for the intentional life we love.

Today, we choose to own one vehicle, cook from scratch, and vacation at a local state park, so that we can also pay down debt, while I work as a full time homemaker and homeschooling mother to our three children. My husband has taken on more paid work and I’ve learned more ways to save money (some from Crystal’s excellent series on 52 Ways to Save $100 per year) to make it work. Our debt repayment is slower than when I worked full-time, but we are living in tune with our most deeply held values. We have never been happier.

Where we are today

I wish I could turn back time and avoid this mountain of debt. If we did it over again, I would never go to graduate school and we wouldn’t borrow so much for either of us. Hindsight is 20/20, though, and we know that we will help our children avoid a similar fate.

A portion of my husband’s loans will be forgiven in 6 years as part of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. Other than those loans, we currently owe $189,000. As our debt snowball grows while the amount of monthly interest we pay decreases, our debt repayment accelerates. We plan to have our loans paid off by 2025.

I can’t say we are thankful for our debt, but with the help of YNAB, we are so very grateful for the lessons this debt has taught us. We are years away from celebrating the success of becoming debt-free, but I feel very successful anyway. Through chasing our life’s purpose, rather than debt repayment or a higher income, we feel like we are exactly where we ought to be.

Jennifer is a radical homemaking, real-food-locavore home-cooking and fermenting, free-range-learning homeschooling, penny-pinching and budget-loving wife to her college sweetheart and mother to their 3 children. They live in a tiny college town in central PA.

Interested in trying out YNAB? Go here to sign up for a free 34-day trial.

This post is underwritten by YNAB. Read our disclosure policy here.