Dave's Got Nothing On Us

About a month ago, my dear sweet hubby found a copy of Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book on our bookshelf. I'd bought it on sale a while ago and wanted to read it. Of course, we're on baby step whatever-it-is where you have debt to pay off first. Because of that, I gave up on reading the whole book and never got through it. Nothing against Davey-boy but when debt's all you see, it's pretty much all you can think about, am I right?

Well CC thought he'd read the book and now both of us are on board and kicking booty and taking names making some changes. The thing now versus back then when I bought the dang book is that we are CLOSE to being done with all our debt. By all our debt, I mean all that's left is less than a year on our student loans. We're trying really hard to be debt-free by our anniversary at the end of May. I think we're going to make it!

We've been making tweaks to deductions and tax stuff and boring words relating to our paychecks in order to see bigger money in the short-term, near future to help us reach our goal of May. We've also been coming up with other nutso ideas to bring in more money.

One idea I came up with is relating to Christmas. This is an especially big deal because we are both BIG gift-givers. It's our love language. We like to get gifts and we love to give them even more. Because of this, Christmas has always bitten us in the tushie been an issue.

A teapot with a tea cozy. How ridiculously adorable is that?!

Back to our idea! This year, we've pared down our list of folks we give gifts to (I know, this was sad. Super sad. As in, you ain't gettin' anything. In case you were curious. Even though I found the PERFECT thing for a certain cuppa-lovin' friend o' mine. Just sayin'.).

After we pared down our peeps, we lowered almost all of our 'budgets' for said peeps. Now usually we set a budget, and then aim-ish for it. Sometimes we hit it, but the reality is that if I find a perfect gift for someone, I'm pretty much guaranteed to go for it, sometimes regardless of the price. It gets me in trouble a lot sometimes occasionally. This year, stick to the budget became the motto.

And finally, the real kicker of the idea for Christmas was this: Get all the shopping done and out of the way BEFORE the Christmas shopping season kicks into high gear and we get sucked in to the emotion of it all. Brilliant, right?! Right. Well fortunately for us, we both got paid last week, I had a couple hooky days off work, and lots of impromptu time on my hands!

So the results are this... we're done!

Do you see the headless dog too?

We had a couple small gifts already purchased from earlier in the year, and I found four gifts on Thursday alone, but we hit the stores hard-core Saturday and Sunday and we're done! (Technically we still have each other to shop for, but even that should get done this week.) I'm going to say it one more time... because I need to. Our Christmas shopping for 2012 is D.O.N.E. Done!

I know, we're THOSE people this year. Which feels odd, but we're pretty strange anyway, so I'm going with it. This brilliant idea will probably end up saving us hundreds of dollars. I'm not exaggerating (that I know of). Every gift is still purchased with lots of thought, care, and love for the recipient. But on a less expensive, less sucked-into-the-emotion-that-goes-with-Christmas-shopping scale. Pretty cool in my book.