House vs Home

Andrew and I have been in the new home for a little over a month now! :)

We are absolutely LOVING it! It's quiet, our vehicles are back in the garage (no more cold vehicles in the morning before work), we have storage space, we have extra bedrooms for friends and family to stay over, and we can FINALLY get back into our normal routine of everyday life!We still don't remember where everything is in, but usually within the week we find it. :)

Andrew and I have always enjoyed watching tv shows on DIY Network and HGTV. Some shows are about  remodeling, some are about yard makeovers, some are about buying and selling,etc. Some make us dream about plans we would love to do in the future and most make us greatly appreciate what we have!

There have been a couple tv episodes recently where an individual goes from renting to being a first time home owner. At the beginning they set a budget as to what they wanted to spend. By the end, they fall in love with the house that is WAY over their budget. They end up buying it and then having buyers' remorse. It makes Andrew and I sick watching it. If you're not going to stick to your budget? Why did you set one in the first place??

Many of you know (if you've read previous posts) that Andrew and I went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peach University Class last year after getting engaged. It was hard to start our budgets right away since we weren't married yet. HOWEVER, once we were a married couple, we set our budget, and did a pretty good job of sticking to it! TRUST ME, it wasn't easy at first, but it's what we WANTED to do. We want to be completely debt free. We want to start saving for when we start a family. We want to start saving for retirement. We want to be able to GIVE and not expect anything in return. We want to live like no one else, so that later we can live like no one else.

I've had a number of individuals ask me how our FPU plan is going now since we bought the house. I can tell that most of them expect me to say, "wellll....we kinda put that on hold" or "what plan?" NO, that is absolutely NOT the case. Instead, I love seeing the shock on their face when I say, "right on track!" See, from day 1 of this "home project" we said that no matter the outcome (whether we did or did not buy a house) we were still going to stick to our plan. We set OUR budget for OUR house so that we could still be debt free(except for the house) in the next couple of years. And guess what, we stuck to that budget! In fact, we came in UNDER that budget! We are still right on track with becoming completely debt free! :)

Our house isn't the fanciest. Our house isn't the biggest. But our house is OUR HOME. We designed it the way we wanted it. We spent what we wanted to spend. We want to raise our future family here. We have turned it into a HOME. In our eyes, it's PERFECT!