Before I was able to quit working after the birth of my 3rd child my husband and I prepared for almost a year, paying off credit cards, car loans, and saving as much as we could to prepare for that first year. I wanted the option to stay home with our kids. Fortunately, we had a budget set up using MS Excel and it was easy to step back and see what we had to do to be in a position for my husband’s income to be sufficient for our needs.
While we had two incomes, it made it easy for us to pay down all of the different debts we had at the time. We had a few credit cards, a car loan, two student loans, and of course a home mortgage. Once we had finished and our son was born, we had paid everything off except for the student loans and the home mortgage. We could afford for me to quit my job if I wanted to take that option.
We got much of our motivation by listening to The Dave Ramsey Show and later his I-Tunes Podcast. If you haven’t listened to Dave Ramsey or read his books, he is a personal finance guru that focuses on debt prevention and elimination as well as other financial topics such as small business and retirement plans. After my husband listened to his show for a few months and explained the concepts, it all made sense and we knew we had to really change our ways if we wanted to make such a change financially. We put everything down on paper, created a spreadsheet budget, and then started to really pay attention to where we were spending our money. We also used the spreadsheet to figure out exactly what it cost to run our house on a monthly basis. We documented every penny we spent to make sure there would be no surprises. What we found was that we were spending a lot of money on eating at restaurants, vending machines, and other wasteful habits.
Tags: Stay-at-home Mom