The first thing you need to know is that my wife and I are on Dave Ramsey’s program, baby step #2 - the debt snowball. If you are not familiar, hit the source link.
The second thing you need to know is that my wife is a graduate assistant, which means she doesn’t have to pay tuition while working on a PhD. YES! AWESOME! HOORAY! At roughly $1500 per class, this is HUGE!.
What isn’t huge? Her salary. Her take home pay is about $15,000 a year. The poverty line is where? Before we got married, she would have qualified for food stamps! Luckily, I have a job.
In my job as a high school music teacher, I make O.K. money. I am not one of those teachers that thinks I am drastically underpaid. My wages are fair. Fair means that I use a budget and pack a lunch to work and eat leftovers for lunch. The key word is budget. Before my wife came along and we got on the Dave Ramsey plan, this is what my budget looked like-
Monthly income, minus monthly expenses = roughly zero-ish, maybe more maybe less depending on what movies and xbox games I bought that month.
Now my budget is incredibly detailed. My wife and I are both nerds. We each have in-depth spreadsheets outlining every expense and every ounce of income before each month begins. Over the top? Maybe, but it works for us.
Most importantly, it allows us to get a head and succeed with our debt snowball.
This is where the dirty word comes in. Tax.
