The Road To Complete Debt Freedom Is Not an Easy One

What does Financial Freedom look like to you??

For us, it means paying off our house and traveling full-time.

A couple of months ago, we introduced you to our financial freedom journey.

We told you that we were planning to pay off our house as quickly as possible and start growing our net worth to over $1,000,000 in our 30’s.

Since we shared that goal with you, we’ve put a pretty big dent in our mortgage and our Net Worth has climbed because of it.

Before we get to where we’re at with our mortgage and our net worth, let me get you caught up on the last several months.

Related Article: The Beginning Of Our Journey To Financial Freedom

We Have A Growing Online Business

November and December were huge months for us at Living Low Key. We landed a really great partnership that helped us make over $20,000 in a single month and pushed our Q4 income to over $40,000!!

That’s crazy for a business that’s all online and that we work on a couple of hours a night from home!

We’ve been steadily growing the business and we’re always looking for ways to help people pay off their debt.

I worked on a lot of really cool tools in the last two months to help people manage their money.

If you need help budgeting, Check out these Budgeting Spreadsheets. We’ve got a net worth tracker in there that we use to track ours. You’ll see more of that below.

If you’re struggling with debt and need help paying it off, check out our Destroy Your Debt Super Bundle. It’s got some really awesome tools in there to help you track all of your debt.

Need help tracking your mortgage payments and calculating how quickly you can pay it off, get our mortgage calculator here. This thing has been clutch in the last week.

California Living: We’ll Be Here Longer

Last month we found out that we’ll be spending at least another year in California.

Staying out here longer spurred plans to go explore this area even more. We’ll be making stops in Yosemite National Park, Big Sur, visiting Oregon, and a whole bunch of other places.

We’re super excited about being out here but we also miss our home in Minnesota. I know, sounds crazy right… How could we miss Minnesota when we’re living in Wine Country.

Minnesota has it’s charm, you know, during the 3 weeks of summer.

The news of us staying out in Cali longer had our minds all over the place. Did we really want to keep the house and pay for something we aren’t using right now? Should we keep it and rent it? Do we remodel it before we move back?

Our minds have gone back and forth between selling it and keeping it to pay it off. It was pretty stressful not knowing what to do.

We’re on this path to become totally debt free and we feel like it has us twisting and turning all over the place, it’s definitely not a straight shot there. But, like all good adventures, sometimes there is more fun in getting there than there is in the actual destination.

In the end, we decided to keep the house in Minnesota and put our focus on paying it off. Here’s how we landed on that decision.

Tools You Can Use: Destroy Your Debt Super Bundle

We Plan To Pay Off The House

We got our house for a very good price just about 3 years ago. Since we bought our house, prices for a new home have gone up significantly.

Our home value has gone up by over $30,000 before we factor in the upgrades we’ve done.

If we sold our house now and chose to buy a newer one later, it would cost us an additional $100,000. That’s a lot of money that we didn’t want to spend.

Another factor is that the markets are crazy right now which is causing interest rates to drop.

We started looking into what refinancing our house could do for us. Using this mortgage calculator I created, we were able to compare what our current payments are versus what they would be if we refinanced.

We decided to refinance because it will drop our interest rate by 1% and our monthly payment by $400! That’s a huge win for us.

Let’s get into the details.

Paying Off Our House Became A Priority

The last update we gave you was in November before we really kicked it into high gear.

A couple of big months with the blog resulted in us being able to make some sizable payments. Check it out.

As you can see we’re making some pretty good progress on paying off the house.

We’re down to owing less than $148,000, that’s why we want to refinance right now.

Our current monthly payment looks like this. (this is a screenshot from our mortgage calculator that can be found in the Destroy your Debt Bundle)

You can see that our current monthly payment is at $1400 at a 3.88% interest rate. We do make extra monthly payments of around $500.

If we were to refinance right now, here’s what it will look like.

We shave almost $400 off our mortgage payment every month which means we can use that to put even more money towards principal payments every month. That’s going to help us pay off our house much faster!

If you want to play around with these mortgage payment calculators, you can pick up that calculator and our Mortgage Payment Tracker for just a couple of bucks while it’s on sale by clicking the button below.

Tracking Our Net Worth

We started tracking our net worth this year. We never really did that before now but we wanted to see where we were at.

I use the Net Worth Tracker that I created in our Budgeting Spreadsheets. It helps paint a really cool picture as you track your net worth growth.

As you can see from the screenshot of our Net Worth Tracker, we started the year out really strong.

Our net worth was growing because our investment accounts were doing well and our mortgage was going down.

The markets got a little crazy the last week of February and the first week of March when I pulled this and that caused a little dip in our Net Worth.

I’m choosing not to look at our investment accounts right now given the state of the markets…

There are two ways to look at the crazy economy right now, you can play it safe and shuffle money around or you can ride the roller coaster.

We’ve taken a mix of both approaches. We decided to keep our emergency fund in a stable Money Market Account so that it’s protected. Here’s our Bank of choice for that.

We’ve also made some cash available so that when the market bottoms out, we can invest heavily. This stock market crash is scary, there’s a lot of talk about recessions.

You can prepare yourself for a recession in just a couple of steps so that it’s not so scary, but I like to think of it as an opportunity to buy investments at a discount.

You need to make sure your finances are all in order to be fully prepared for a recession. If you’re looking to take advantage of this economic downturn and buy a great stock at a discounted price, Webull offers a great platform with no fees to help you invest in the stock market.

The Stock Market can be a scary place. There’s a lot going on there and if you’re new to it, it can be intimidating.

If you need advice on how and what to invest your money on in the stock market, The Motley Fool is a great resource with excellent guidance.

Great Investing, Simplified: Get Stock Advisor for Just $99/year!

Don’t panic with the market swings right now, it will rebound. You only realize losses if you cash out your investments now.

Even with all the crazy swings in the market, we’re still about a third of the way to hitting our million dollar net worth goal in our 30’s.

The Journey Continues: Here’s what’s next

So there you have it, we’ve paid down our house over $40,000 in the last several months and we plan to keep that going.

We’re $148,000 away from being completely financially free. That’s the ultimate goal for us all, become Financially Free so we can live our best life!!

We’ve always had this dream of traveling the country in an RV.

Once we pay off that house, that dream becomes even more achievable. Make sure you join our community below so you can follow along as we chase that goal and eventually hit the road full-time.

Resources Mentioned In This Article

> Mortgage Payment Calculator

> Destroy Your Debt Super Bundle

> Customizable Budgeting Spreadsheets with Net Worth Tracker

> CIT Bank: The Best Online Bank

> > Buying/Selling Stock: Webull

> Stock Market Advice: The Motley Fool