living like no one else

It seems the closer we get to being debt-free, the more things keep popping up to frustrate or tantalize us.  I can't count how many times lately one of us has begun a sentence with the phrase, "When we're out of debt..."  It isn't that we want a new car or even new furniture.  It's just the little annoyances that we plan to eliminate when we're not pinching every penny to get out from under the thumb of our one remaining creditor.

Me cutting up the first credit card I ever got:)

Whenever we sit down to watch a movie, we brace ourselves for the inevitable pauses that we'll experience throughout the viewing, courtesy of our ridiculous DVD player.  (The irony?  It was part of the first stupid financing we ever did.  It was something like 6 months same as cash, and we didn't end up paying interest or anything, but it still makes me cringe.  It started acting up on us before we'd even paid it off.)

Husband and I sleep under a comforter that is so threadbare we can barely even tell it exists.  Now, we were also blessed with a white down comforter as a wedding gift, which we place underneath the patterned comforter in the winter... but it shifts and bunches up.  The other night, the down comforter had somehow completely bunched up at my feet, and I was just underneath the sheet and the old, thin, faded comforter.  Of course, in the middle of the night, I didn't realize that and just wondered why on earth I was so uncomfortably chilly!

I've bought about a dozen items of clothing since baby was born.  There's nothing in my closet that's really high-quality or lasting or tailored, and I dress in jeans and tees most of the time.  I'm tired of it, but every time I look at my wardrobe and sigh, I remember that there's a reason for this temporary sacrifice.

Our toaster is just plain annoying.  To empty the crumb tray, you have to jiggle it, which of course leaves crumbs all over the counter.  And toast gets stuck constantly.  The normal cycle for having a piece of toast includes unplugging the dang thing so you can stick the butter knife in to pry your mangled piece of bread from the clutches of the toaster coils.  (This was not a $5 toaster.  It really should not be this troublesome.)

I HATE HATE HATE cleaning my kitchen/dining room floors.  I would so love to have something like a Shark that's an all-in-one tool and has suction.  I can spend an entire naptime on those hard floors and then find little pieces that have been left behind by my old, crappy broom and mop.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about my household is the trash.  When we moved in and researched trash pickup services, we were a bit shell-shocked by the price out here.  Waste management was included in our HOA fees in Colorado, so we were unprepared for the steep cost.  We worked out a deal with my parents: we pay a portion of their trash/recycling bill and haul our trash/recycling out to their hoppers every week.  Is this fun?

Um... no.

Our haul includes diapers, cat litter, and cat food cans (albeit rinsed out) in addition to the run-of-the-mill kitchen and household waste.  For a while, it sits in our garage, and then we pile it into the car.  Let me tell you: that drive across town feels WAY longer than 10 minutes, and the smell gets progressively riper... this is kind of a big stinkin' deal.

Casualties of the credit card massacre of the Financial Peace University class we facilitated

I'm not complaining, and I'm not pretending that no one else has these annoyances in their lives.  What I'm saying is this: we could totally afford to replace or purchase these things.  For the most part, we wouldn't even feel it in the budget if we did.  But we're so close.  I can practically taste the financial freedom.  And holding off on these simple luxuries is a small, small price to pay for that day when we are no longer beholden to any creditors.*

Dave Ramsey says, "If you will live like no one else, later you can LIVE like no one else!"  Don't get me wrong: we have luxuries that so many families only dream of.  But I don't know a whole lot of people living on our household income that are sharing the cost of trash pickup services and refusing to purchase a functioning toaster.  To that end, we are living like no one else.  And the LIVING, like no one else, is just on the horizon.


*Mortgage holder excluded -- that will come eventually!