What recession?

Last Thursday night Brannon and I attended Dave Ramsey's national "Town Hall for Hope" event that was telecasted live at Branson United Methodist Church, one of the 6,000 hosts of the nationwide event. Dave encouraged the nation to "choose hope" by refusing to be a part of the recession. Fear, he said, (like that has been instilled in our country by Washington and the media regarding the current financial times) is the antithesis of hope. We absolutely loved Dave's message. It was refreshing, inspiring and -- more than anything -- personally motivating. To see what I'm talking about, check out http://www.townhallforhope.com/.

Brannon and I have made several changes in our spending in our quest to become debt-free, as we also refuse to be victims of the so-called recession. So I thought I'd share a few of the things we've learned and principles we've instituted recently:

First of all, I jumped on the coupon bandwagon full force at the beginning of this year. My friend Hillary blogged about this a while back and referred me to http://www.thethriftymama.com/, which is constantly updated with the best deals and coupons across the country. Hillary and her fellow coupon bloggers have educated me -- from a distance -- on the art of couponing. The biggest thing I've learned is that you can pair manufacturer's coupons with store coupons, plus many grocery stores double coupons! I've been amazed at how much money we've saved, and on items we buy regularly anyways. Brannon is pretty impressed, too. At first he wasn't sure about my new obsession (just imagine me looking like Edward Scissorhands, paper flying, cats diving into mountains of paper, coupons scattered everywhere! Ok, I digress...), but several free and nearly-free meals, deals and grocery items later... he was sold!

We've also been blessed to be able to get by with only one car since we've been married. We realize that we won't always be able to share a car so easily (thanks to living on campus and being sans kids), so we're choosing to rely on one car for now. And our family recently blessed us with a new-to-us car (which, by the way, is a little red convertible Miata!), so our plan is to continue on with one car like we have since we got married -- which will keep our gas, insurance, taxes, maintenance and overall car expenses down.

Another major expense cutter for us was our decision to virtually eliminate our eating out expenses. We don't have a specific budget for eating out, so if we want to eat out -- it's gotta be cheap (Hello, coupons! Hola, Taco Bell!) and it comes out of our grocery money.

To sum it up, it's been an adventure learning how to cut back and save money. But the best part of it all is that we do have hope -- hope that freedom from debt is just around the corner. And we've found that there's joy in being able to live off of little, especially when we're learning how to do so together.