Frugal Living & Eliminating Debt {Final Update for 2013}

With yesterday starting off the final month of 2013 my husband and I had a "budget + finances" talk over coffee. We typically drink something warm when discussing finances in order to pretend like we're enjoying the conversation. 

We were so excited to find that we paid off many more debts than we expected to this year... and saved quite a bit of money too {paying off over ten thousand dollars of debt that was not already part of our monthly payments and saving over ten thousand dollars for a rainy day!} 

I suppose there are better ways to do it, but our simple plan of paying off our highest interest rate bills first seemed to work for us. Which means that I'm calling this goal completed... and a total success!

As for the savings, one thing we did about half way through the year was make a savings goal and act on it. We thought about what we could realistically save each month... taking into account what we might spend on monthly bills, but also what we'd have to work hard {or spend less} in order to save. Then we put away that money before we could even spend it. In fact we treated it as a bill that we had to pay to our savings account.

This worked really well for us and we will most likely keep this same plan for next year too.