Getting Started . . . .

Here goes nothing.  For my first post I thought I would layout our situation and hopefully I will be able to look back and reminisce about how far along we have come in our financial situation.

I have been married 6 years and have 2 year old son and daughter due in March.
We own The bank owns a 3 bedroom, 2 bath ranch style home in which we live.
DH and I both work full time and put our son in daycare full time.

We are trying to pay off our debt so that I can work part time and we don't have to put 2 kids in daycare, and we are still trying to figure out exactly how that is going to work.  We reevaluated our financial situation last summer when I realized I was pregnant again and at that point our debt stats were:

Credit Cards - $29,322.44
Car Loans - $5,465.34
Student Loans - $45,211.21
Mortgage - $149,626.99
Emergency Fund - $0 (in fact I didn't even know what this was)

The realization that hit me over the head at that point was that I wouldn't have to work very much at all if we didn't have so many debt payments obligations.  DH and I make a good living and we were paying everything on time, but we never made in progress in our debt . . . and over the past 2 years, our CC debt has gone from ~20K to 30K.  We got serious and for the past 6 months we have concentrating on changing our lifestyle and paying off our debts, concentrating on the car loans and CCs first.  We have managed to pay down about 15% so far.

I added tickers to this blog so that I could keep track of where I stand with my short term goals.

In 2010, I would like to:
#1 - Have a healthy baby, au natural.
#2 - Not incur any additional CC debt during my unpaid maternity leave.
#3 - Pay my CC and car loan debt down to 50% before the end of the year.
#4 - Get my Emergency fund balance back up to $1000

Wish me luck!

Kate