Debt Free Update!

First off, Eric and I are surrounded by people who either have their parents help them with things (I.e. give them a car to drive, help them with a down payment on a house, or just flat out paid for their college) and sometimes it can be really hard.

"Oh, you're building a new house?"

"Oh, you got a new car?"

"Oh, you're parents are coming down to babysit so you can take a vacation to the Bahamas with money saved from not having to put that down payment on a house?"

It's a hard pill to swallow knowing that we can't take that vacation to the Bahamas because we have to pay almost twice our mortgage in daycare since Grandma and Grandpa don't watch our kids. Dont get me wrong, we don't judge. If your parents are willing to help you out to try and give you a better life, that's great. Our parents are not willing to do that and sometimes it can be a harsh reality.

But at the same time, everything we have we did ourselves.

So there are the people whom we are surrounded by... And then there's us.

We both drive vehicles that are over 10 years old and over 100,000 miles, but we own them. Our parents did not buy them for us.

We paid off Eric's Community College loan while I was still in school. I left school almost $25,000 in debt. But I have been overpaying every loan and it has paid off. Not to mention we scrimped and saved for a down payment on a house and somehow, in the end, came up with almost $9000 to put toward a $127,000 mortgage.

As it sits, Eric and I have one of my student loans left with less than $6000 (at 2.2% interest nonetheless), a mortgage of somewhere in the $106,000 range and we are sitting in a house that, with all the updates, came back appraised just this year at $160,000.

Are we sitting as well financially as the people that surround us? Probably not... But at the end of the day, we can honestly say that we have done all of this by ourselves.

Thanks to paying off my most recent loans (both of which sat at 5.5% and 6.4%, respectively - ouch!) we will have an almost $500 windfall each month to put in the bank.

And I would rather have my own money in the bank, rather than my parents'.