Marisa Porter

We can breathe more easily. When I wake up in the night, I’m not as prone to think of all our failures. Instead I feel whole, accomplished, strong. The feeling that I imagine people have right after tackling a mountain climb, or a kayak adventure, or killing a bear that was about to eat them, is ours. It’s not as big of a deal when other little things are wrong – because one big thing is right. We’re winning.

When you climb the mountains, you come to certain places where you can see farther and get a better perspective on how far you’ve actually come. This weekend was a moment like that for us.

We delivered a relatively large check to someone who has given us a personal loan in the past. And there’s just a tiny little bit of this left – pretty much a few drops  in a bucket.

When we started this journey we had so many debts: 7-11 or something. When we pay off this personal loan, we’ll have 3.  I should also mention that we are about 52% of the way to our goal. And though the remaining ones will be the largest, our snowball payment has grown to intimidating proportions. Run, Sallie Mae, run.

Speaking of Sallie Mae, ungodly interest rates and wimpy minimum payments would be the reason that the needle has not moved, at all, on the largest of our debts.

Just you wait, Sallie Mae. Some igloo of a snowball is coming your way.

And one day we’ll be like this person:

back story:

In June 2010, we started this journey. We attended the Dave Ramsey classes at our local church here in Central Pennsylvania. Unlike some of our co-students, we actually needed these classes.  

“Why did you come?” The questions went around our table. 

“To learn how to invest,” “To get a better handle on my finances,” were some of the answers.  “Um…because we need help managing our debt.” That was something like our answer. I remember the overwhelming feeling of shame that we had incurred a mountain of debt. I’ll include more on this later.