My husband and I (ok more like I) finally sat down and made a very PG rated budget. (Confession...I have never made one before in my life.) We haven't really gotten down to the nitty gritty R rated version but I put in our fixed expenses and made an estimate of what we would ideally like to spend for groceries/restaurants/entertainment and books. We read a lot. But we buy our books from a second hand bookstore. I know a lot of people would argue that the library is free but we keep our books and reread them over and over again. We also have kindles :) and we only get books MAYBE once a month and for about $30.00 for four or five books. We honestly do not buy a lot of "things" the most we spend on is food/entertainment. Alright, so the thing is if you look at our joint bank account right now we would have enough in there to cover 4 months of paychecks (not expenses-the actual paycheck he would make.) We certainly on paper look like we are doing well and for the most part we are. A couple months ago we applied and got approved for American Express cards. We use our cards like debit cards and at the end of the month the entire balance is autodebited from our account. The reason being is that you are not able to hold a balance on American Express past the closing date or the day by day charges are horrible! This has been working out for us very well because 1) we receive points for each purchase that we make which can go towards a myriad of things. We can even link it to our amazon.com account and get free purchases. 2) We cannot treat the card like a credit card and overspend because we know come hell or high water that money is coming out of our account at the end of the month. 3) My husband enjoys the security of using credit versus debit in case our cards got stolen, we would a) not lose all of our money and b) would not be held liable for any charges that took place when our card got stolen.

Our" debts:

•  We have a Helzberg card from our wedding bands that are currently 0% APR for 12 months and we have a balance of around $1,500 right now. We currently pay $200 a month on it and it will be paid off WELL before the promotional rate dissappears. We had the money to buy them in cash at the time but since we wouldn't have to pay any interest it wasn't really any type of loss.

Original balance 1,000 down to $648.93

My new lowest student loan is down to $648.93. I am still plugging along trying to pay off my loans. If I pay $300 a month I'll be able to pay off my second loan this year in a little over 2 months. I am so determined to pay down my loans as fast as possible. I should probably work on paying down my credit card as well but I feel like actual progress is getting made with my loans versus the large credit card that won't go down until I make my large $500 payments. By continuing to pay minimum on the rest of my loans and paying down the smallest loans first I am building momentum each and every single day. Let's hope we can continue this way.