Evolution of a 30-something

Hey Y'all. As most of you know, Megan and I got married on March 1st of this year in Mexico. Many family members and close friends were able to make it to celebrate with us. This was the best party of my life and we had an amazing time, for an entire week! While the wedding day, and week, were great, this blog is going to focus on married life as a whole, not just the wedding itself. Some of the people who have reached out to me and told me about their blog reading enjoyment are at or near these stages and I wanted to share some of the feelings I've had recently being a newly married person. Challenges - every relationship worth having has some challenges. I would say Megan and I tend to have few challenges, but one of our biggest, although silly, was choosing furniture. If we could make it through this, we could make it through anything (poor attempt at a joke). She wanted style, I wanted comfort. She wanted practical, I wanted comfort. She wanted it shades and tones, I w...

Hey y'all. When I started this blog about a month ago, I really didn't know where it would go other than trying out a few things and seeing if anyone was interested. From the number of readers I'm seeing through Blogger and Google analytics, it is apparent that there is at least a moderate following, so we're gonna keep going! I wanted to recap the first month and then see what you, the readers, are up to currently. Bullet points are easy to read, so here we go: Friday nights changed I have new hobbies We went to Nashville We got "evicted" but had a plan, stuck to it, and found a new apartment Readers had feedback so I shared more of our plan  Here are some of the comments I've heard from some of you. (From people I was surprised were reading) I'm really enjoying your blog. It is very relatable and totally true about how life has changed as I've gotten older and grown up. I'm downloading that EveryDollar app and putting to use what I...

So after the last post and stating that our plan is to save a large down payment and put our first house a 15-year, fixed rate mortgage, with the plan to pay off early, I received a lot of comments like "What's Dave have against a 30 year mortgage, Good luck!" and "man, me too (sarcastically)". Disclaimer - I asked them if I could use their comments. Now before you guys write me off, hear me out. I know everyone is at different spots in their lives. I am recently married, have never had a mortgage, don't have kids, etc. You guys think I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, right? Well guess what, I have been. I know you think I'm crazy, but I've followed this plan for two+ years now and everything to this point has worked as planned. I've run some moderate calculations out on the amount of money we expect to save. The way I was able to do this was to plan by using our average monthly budget and multiplied it out over the course of a year (simple ...

Have you ever gotten some crumby news? Like you have a plan and you're working towards it, and then, wham! Recently, this happened to Megan and I. We have been renting an apartment for coming up on two years and had planned to live here at least one more year, while we save up a down payment for our first home. The plan was to rent here until we could comfortably purchase a home (more on this in a bit). We ran some numbers prior to being married and have recalculated since being married and the plan was to hopefully purchase a home in the Spring/Summer 2019. The news we received was that our leasing company was not going to let us renew our lease, not because we are bad tenants, but because their son wants our specific unit. It is frustrating to us on many levels as we take care of this property better than most, and probably the son who will live here for free. Since our wedding, and receiving many gifts (thank you family and friends!), we have really continued to make ...