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From Treat Yourself, To Check Yourself

June 20, 2022 As we entered 2022, we knew that we not only needed to make healthy choices for our physical and mental health, but for our financial health as well. Growing up experiencing financial instability and witnessing our families struggling to make ends meet had a huge impact on the way we viewed finances as a couple, but we still found ourselves stuck in the same vicious cycles we grew up with. We are so grateful to have been paired with Jessica as our financial coach. Jessica has an innate ability to put any situation into a positive perspective, and also to make it a learning opportunity. Jessica immediately approached us with empathy, compassion, and determination. We feel so ready to begin this journey and have not only set some positive and attainable goals for ourselves, but we have been making much healthier financial choices. One thing that has been a dark cloud hanging over our head, and has also been a hindrance upon our ability to buy a home, is debt. We have found ourselves buried in debt from credit cards and personal loans, and with the help of our amazing financial coach, we have found a path forward to aggressively tackle that debt so that we can begin our journey to homeownership. Laying out your entire financial situation for anyone is an incredibly vulnerable moment, but Jessica helped us to take a deep dive into our finances and we found several places where we can save and use those funds to pay towards debt and put towards savings. One place where we are saving is our daily coffee runs! It always felt good to say “Treat yoself” and buy a drink at Starbucks, but this was quickly adding up, and much to our dismay we found we could save nearly $300 per month not buying coffee! We are also cutting ties with many streaming services, unused gym memberships, and expensive takeout orders. We have felt so much relief already. We are really excited to be using Summit’s Climbr® feature through the Summit app to track our spending habits and to see exactly how we are spending our money, and what general categories our spending is falling under. Thank you all for following us on this journey and thank you Summit for this opportunity! You might also be interested in The past six months have been so transformative for us, and it is hard not to get emotional as we write this last blog post. We are finally financially free. Not only in our reduced debt and increased savings, but in our mindset towards finances and the way we approach financial conversations with each other. And where the heart is, of course… This week has been so trying. We are all recovering (slowly) from the flu that hit us HARD. Dominique and Megan both missed a ton of work and there was no end to unpacking in sight. Having to put unpacking on hold immediately after our move was really hard for us, it also made it really hard to cook at home and save money on take-out. We did not do well with that budget item this week once again, but we have been working on getting unpacked as we feel better. We are finally moved into our new home and fully out of our apartment. It was hard to say goodbye to the apartment we had many good memories in, but we are so excited to make new memories in our home. We already know lots of neighbors near us and are still working to get settled in. We have been making it a rule to not buy anything new unless we give away or trash an old item. We have been pretty good with it and Megan has taken many carloads to St Vinny’s or Goodwill or has sold items on the marketplace. We finally closed on our home on November 30 and have been slowly working on moving responsibilities over the past few days. We have had to make a lot of decisions about what projects to take on first and are hoping to structure a capital needs assessment over the next five years to determine what projects are a priority and when. This week we are coming off of a long weekend after Thanksgiving where we are feeling immense gratitude for so many things. We are thankful for our financial coach, Jessica, who helped us to accomplish our ultimate goal of buying a home before the program has even ended. With her support and encouragement, we found a way to forge a path to homeownership. We were notified this week that we have been cleared to close for our new home. We are so excited to move in and have been so blessed with amazing friends who have given us so many BOXES and TAPE! Those two items are so expensive and make moving costs skyrocket. We have planned out our moving budget and anticipate spending around $800 for movers and $1,200-$1,800 initially for things we need for our home. This week we have been struggling with juggling multiple schedules, illness, outside priorities and activities, and a tumultuous election season. We have not had energy to cook or sometimes keep the house as tidy as we used to so we have been ordering a lot of take out. I think that is the “ugly” part of this that we need to be honest about where our priorities are and this week they are not with cooking and staying within our food budget. This week we have been working on several things. Our son was accepted to our first-choice preschool and we have been overjoyed. With that joy, there is a bit of anxiety with the price that comes along with childcare. We wanted a childcare center that pays staff and teachers well as well as centers diversity and inclusion. We are so excited for Arrow and know he will grow and thrive there. The price per month is higher than many people’s mortgage payments, and along with us closing on a house soon, we know that it will be something we need to fit into our budget starting next Fall. This week we worked on spending less and we think we did a better job than previous weeks. We prepared a lot more meals at home and planned to not spend a lot of money on Halloween and Fall festivities even though the weather has been absolutely beautiful. We did get out to a haunted house and took the kiddos trick or treating which was very fun. 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