Prologue - Not Yet Debt Free

I am a professional woman in my 40's, working and living in southeastern Michigan.  I have been married for 23 years to a man I fell in love with 27 years back.  We have a daughter away at university.

We have made the difficult decision to sell the house I deeply love, because we will earn enough from the sale to be debt free.

• We will pay off the house we are selling, 
• pay off an 'underwater' house we own that has a renter in it
• and pay off $20K in student loans from (non-traditional) undergrad

We will then have enough saved for:

• a new (used) car (our cars are 9 and 16 years old)
• tuition for my current graduate work
• my CPA exam if I decide to take that route
• paying the first year's taxes and insurance on our income property
• a little money for a quickly upcoming trip to Paris
• paying off our balance owed for a trip next year
• anything extra goes into the emergency fund, where we're aiming for 6 month's living expenses.

We use credit cards but never carry a balance, so we don't have to worry about that.  Our daughter is a rising Jr in college and has money in the bank to get her through.  We pay her rent.

Our suite view at El Dorado Maroma outside of Playa del Carmen, April 2016.

We have (after 23 years of marriage) finally agreed* our financial goals.

1. Emergency Fund
2. Travel, the real reason we're driven to do this
3. Retirement (we're a bit behind)
4. Cash to buy the house we'll retire in, hopefully waterfront. 

We have a post-sale budget in place.  More on that later.

We married young and never thought we'd be debt free.  But to stay debt free, we'll have to be more disciplined than we've ever been.  This blog is here because I'm proud of this accomplishment and want to share it, but also because I hope it will hold me accountable.

Fingers crossed, we will close on the sale of my beautiful, light-filled home in the next month.

*negotiated to an agreement, with some parts both hard and flexible, and the knowledge that we're like to fight about it later...