HisHersMoney

We are almost debt free!! I can’t wait until we can say we are completely debt free. We have about $600 left on the credit card to pay and less then $2000 left on His student loan. We will be paying off the rest of the credit card in this upcoming month and have already stated paying an additional $100 a month on the student loan making our payments around $175 a month.

Side note: We do have a car loan. We made a decision over a year ago to have one car loan at a time. We would finance the car for four years and when it was paid off we would replace the other car. So yes, we will always have a car loan to pay on but we plan on driving each car for eight years. It’s the cost of having two cars for us. YMMV (your milage may vary).

So far since we have started this blog we have paid off one car loan, two other student loans and over $14,000 in credit card debt. It wasn’t easy but I don’t feel like we’ve had to give everything up to do it. Just buckled down and made it our priority.

Next goal is really working on the savings account!

We haven’t posted anything here on the site about Him being out of work but he has actually been out of work since July 15th. He is in the Army and was mobilized for the past year. Luckily he was mobilized here locally so we didn’t have to deal with long distance pressures. When his orders ended he was left in a state of limbo where he didn’t know if his orders were going to be renewed and if they were when it would happen.

Financially things haven’t been that tight as he was paid through the middle of July and then was also cashed out for his remaining vacation time and was also still owed two reimbursement checks for housing. UNfortunately we still haven’t received all of the payments owed to us but we did manage to squeeze by without having to put anything on the credit cards or dip into our savings.

We decided to look at other employment options for Him. I work as a Defense Contractor (like a large portion of the professional population in the Washington DC metro area) and we decided that maybe moving from the Government side so the contractor side might not be such a bad idea. So fast forward a couple weeks to today and he has received and accepted a job offer to be a contractor doing almost the same exact job as he was doing before and today is his first day!

He will still be part of the National Guard and will work his one weekend a month and of course could possibly be deployed in the future but for now he will go to work M-F like the rest of this town in a shirt and tie.

Over the next week we will be looking at how to merge His paycheck and retirement savings into our overall financial picture and will keep everyone updated.

After a long weekend in the coding trenches, immersed in the inner-workings of Wordpress, it looks as though I’m finally 99% happy with our little website. There’s still a little tweak or two to be made at some point but I’m not fretting about it. So what exactly was done?

Well, with Wordpress 2.5 released, I upgraded to that. Easily done as we were already running the pre-release version here. I also had become less than happy (already!) with the look of the site and rebuilt it by modifying the freely available Xplosive Reloaded theme from Blog Oh! Blog. Make sure you try out the different color schemes by using the links on the top-right! In trying to not completely geek out on everyone and in keeping with the personal finance theme, here’s a list of the tools I used and the cost associated with them. Note that I use a Mac so these programs may not be available to you.

• CSSEdit – Shareware – 29.95€ – A wonderful CSS editor that lets you extract styles directly from websites and edit them in real-time to see the results.
• GIMP – Open-Source – Free – If you don’t need to do a ton of image-editing or if you’re just too poor (like me) to purchase Photoshop, the GIMP is an excellent free alternative.
• Yummy FTP – Shareware – $25 – My favorite FTP program ever. Performance is good. Their folder sync feature is what I use to backup my websites. Transmit is another good yet more expensive alternative for Mac users and Cyberduck is an open-source alternative.
• TextMate – Shareware – 39€ – One of the leading text editors around. Fairly expensive, in fact the most expensive piece of software listed. But if you do any coding, from HTML, PHP, C++, etc… this is a great program. The best part for me is that it interacts with YummyFTP and lets me edit files directly on the web server. TextWrangler is a free version of BBEdit for those looking to save money.

You’ll notice that I use mostly shareware or open-source software. I find the quality to be just as good if not better than that of the giant software publishers. It also normally is much cheaper and I end up supporting small business owners that are passionate about their products.

For you other bloggers out there. What tools do YOU use to keep everything up and running?

Hello everyone and let me start off by welcoming you to our site. First, a little background: As our name says we are a His and Hers. We are in our early 30’s and starting off a life together as a “couple”. Being that we are already in our 30’s we both already have our own finances and lives so now we are in the process of merging them. Both of us bring some sort of debt to the table (who doesn’t these days), Hers has these pesky student loans and a car loan and Him has student loans, credit cards and a car note. Could it be any more fun than that???We live in the Washington DC area so housing is astronomical (not saying it’s cheap anywhere these days)! We rent an apartment in a high rise and the idea of buying what seems like 14 square feet for a cool million is not even in our near future!!! Both His and Hers have decent jobs and make a decent living and try very hard to keep our spending within our means.So here’s my current debt situation, His will post his separately and we will both cover assets in a later post. We are really just starting down the path of combining our finances so you, our readers, will be learning real time!