Last year Branden and I discovered Dave Ramsey and his 7 Baby Steps to Getting Debt Free. I fell in love with him and his amazing way of living life. He lives well within his means and his motto is "Live like no one else now so you can live like no one else later." Meaning if you can sacrifice the expensive, over priced things now, later in life you will be able to live a debt free, stress free life with amazing things such as a nice home, a nice car, savings you can eventually live off of and things like that. He talks about paying cash and paying off debt. Taking responsibility for that debt and moving on from it. He has been there, done that and is an inspiration.
My husband and I knew we wanted to be debt free when we had a baby. We didn't want to have to worry so much about every little bill we had. We do not follow his steps 100% but we do try to use them as guidelines on the big things. The first step is simple, start a savings account with $1,000 of Emergency Funds. This was pretty easy for us to do right away and we moved on to step 2. Pay off Debt! This was takes time. He gives great tips on how to make this happen and we were able to pay off pretty much all our debt except my leased car and my husbands student loan. We haven't started on that one only because he has it down to half of what he owed and its not gaining interest and he doesn't have to pay it while he is in  school, so we decided to hold off on that. We definitely sacrificed in a way to get our debt paid off. My parents, who are incredibly generous gave us money towards a honeymoon that we put towards our Emergency Savings and paying off some debt. We still had much more to pay off and only had about $1,500 by this Christmas that needed to be paid off. I was already pregnant so we were set on getting this taken care of. My parents, not knowing we were doing this, had given us all a present for Christmas and they always make things equal so since my sister got an amazing lap top they gave us a check as well to even things out. I was in shock. I was not expecting this at all. I as almost in tears because it was just under what we needed to pay off our last remaining debt. We took my next paycheck and paid the last of it off and were credit card debt free and my husbands car was also paid off at this point. After this we decided to start saving part of my paychecks to help for when baby comes. It has been a bit of a sacrifice as we used to love to go on little trips throughout the year and once I got pregnant we decided to not do that until we felt comfortable with our savings but it has been worth it.  I feel like the best advice anyone can ever give another person, especially their child is to live this way. Do not open a credit card to "build credit". Dave explains how this is not necessary. Its amazing how one book can really open up your eyes to a whole new way of living.
Our next big step will be buying a car with cash and trying not to finance any of it. If need be we will but we now know how to go in there and get the price we want.
I highly suggest anyone out there who feels horrible about their financial state to look into his books. He is so inspiring, encouraging and smart about money that it makes you feel like you can really become a millionaire one day. The book we bought was called The Total Money Makeover, try to buy it used to save some money ;-)  His site has a lot of information so you may not even need the book. Check it out!