Feedback from readers, trying to defend myself!

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 enough...as long as you have a budget to calculate from). As I mentioned previously, life comes at you - new tires, brakes, rotors, apartment "eviction" and so on. 

There are not many lifestyle areas that I feel I do not participate in just the same as my friends. I hang out, eat at restaurants (in moderation), go to bars, go on vacations, buy new clothes/shoes, and don't make an outrageous amount of money. Just this month we bought our flights to visit Megan's sister and fiance in Colorado.

Quick advice to married couples that own a home or have kids: You need to have life insurance! Since we rent and don't have payments that would need to be supplemented by the other spouse's income, we don't have life insurance yet, but before we buy a home or have kids we will be purchasing life insurance. I want you all to live forever, but it terrifies me to think of what your spouse would have to go through without being financially covered to continue paying for your house, or be able to provide for your child(ren) without the other spouse around.

On this plan, some of the things we've been able to do over the last year:

• Become debt free: no student loans, car loans, or credit card debt
• Cash flow my Master's degree (paid as I went with no loans)
• Max out Roth IRA's (my favorite method of retirement outside of matched contributions) for 2017
• Continue investing what will be maxed out Roth IRA's for 2018
• Contribute our required and matched 6.7% of pay into our pension plan for state employees
• Cash flow our destination wedding (we did receive some generous gifts, but had this plan in place with or without these monetary gifts)
• Remove a lot of unnecessary stress of having to pay people every month

In order to do all of this, we did work some extra jobs on nights or weekends, by choice, not by force, but did not miss out on (m)any very important functions. This is not totally required or necessary, just a choice we made to speed some things up. However, the most important way we got to where we are right now is by having a budget in place and putting our money in the categories we had planned before we just spent our money. We do this using EveryDollar, which is a website and app you can use (and share with a spouse) to build a budget, then track it as you go through the month. There is a free version that we use that you have to login and manually enter as you spend (or go back using your online statements), or a paid version that will alert you and have you categorize after you spend automatically.

Here is an example of our monthly budget for June with our goal of saving a large down payment. Should you use this app or another budgeting tool (not one you have in your head and think you accomplish goals), your numbers and breakdown will be different, but this is how our current budget shaped up. We have our down payment fund in it's own savings account through our Credit Union so we don't accidentally spend it on something else.

Some of you probably think I'm a "nerd or dork" because of having a plan like this, or spending some time each month going over a budget with my wife, or because I actually care about retirement at 33 (this week). It is very easy to think retirement will take care of itself or you don't need to worry about it yet. One of the most important factors in growing a retirement account is the advantage of compound interest over time. 

So let me end with this...someone is going to get rich off your income, why shouldn't it be you? There is a difference between can't and won't. You CAN do this!