Last month (December 2016) I started this blog in hopes of keeping ourselves accountable and committing to our goals of paying off our credit card debt and mastering the budget process.

We started with a balance of $40k and are now at $37k, seeing this has motivated DW and myself. We've been using Mint.com to help us understand where our money was going and this helped us cut expenses, which was great but it did lack some features that I am learning are necessary for budgeting. Now that we've cut as much as possible it's time to take it a step further.

One of our 2017 goals is to master the budgeting process and after hours of watching videos and doing research we decided we liked what YNAB (You Need A Budget) has to offer. We are 1 week into using YNAB and we are absolutely loving it! This forces us to manually enter in our transactions and balance our accounts and budget. We know more about our expenses and can be more mindful before we spend. We also love all the reading material available on the YNAB for free. This is my two cents anyway.

So, I'll report back on our new budget mastery skills with an update on more debt payments when we get paid again.

Oh and one last thing, DS got a job! We have decided to let DS in on our budget and debt payment journey in hopes he learns from our mistakes. We recently set him up with a new bank account so a YNAB account is next. We plan to have family budget night every paycheck(All three of us will get paid on the same paycycle) and splurge on a pizza.

I have to say, this site has definitely changed our lives for the better and the support on here has been more than I can ever ask for.