I'm about to drop an a-bomb up in here

Do you remember that time when you were married for 2.5 years, had a 7 month old baby and moved back into your parents' house by choice?  No?  Must just be me then.     

Yes, it's true.  D, L and I are renting out our house and moving in with my parents, hopefully at the end of June.  You may be wondering why in the world we would do this.  

The answer is because D and I have decided to become gazelles.  

If you haven't clicked that red X in the right corner of your screen yet, you might be thinking that my blog is smoking something funny today.  Fear not, I'm not hanging out with Mary Jane.  

D and I are in the middle of a program called Financial Peace University by Dave Ramsey.  In it, he talks about becoming "gazelle-intense" about paying off debt and working your way to financial security.  The reason he uses a gazelle is because of how focused a gazelle is when they are running from a cheetah in the wild.  In the world of our finances, the cheetah is debt.  

Since starting FPU, D and I have been crunching the numbers over and over.  Oddly enough, they stayed the same every time, and every time, we saw that, like most other people, our biggest financial obligation is our mortgage.   We don't have a ton of debt.  We don't have any credit card debt (which I'm very proud of), but we do have my student loans, which are way bigger than I'd like them to be, especially since I've been paying on them for 3 years now and they haven't really seemed to decrease.  

    

Anyway, it's a long story but my dad is going to be out of the country for 9ish months starting in October, and my mom will be home "alone".  (Well, not alone anymore, since now we're moving in there, but she was going to be alone.)  So the four of us talked about it, and this crazy plan was hatched.  D and I figured out that if we can rent out our house for a year, we can put our mortgage payment on my student loans for that year and pay off TWO of them during that time.  That's right, two of my three loans will be gone after only a year.  

I'm not at all blind to how hard it's going to be to move back in with mommy and daddy after being out of the house for almost 3 years.  But believe me, as hard a sacrifice as it will be for me, it will be even harder for D and for my parents.  I mean, how would you feel if you've spent your life trying to get your children out of the house, you finally feel like you've done it (for the first time, this year my brother did not move home for the summer) and suddenly you've got your adult daughter and her little family (+ dog) knocking on your door, asking to come back.   

But it's going to be kind-of nice, too.  For one thing, my parents have a cleaning lady.  So heck yes on that note.  Also, it will be nice to have someone around to talk to on the nights that D works.  My mom and I used to have girl's nights when I still lived at home and my dad was still working.  On the nights D was working and my dad was working, we'd get a movie and a bottle of wine and either watch the movie or not watch the movie and gab about life.  I'm looking forward to that.  

And mainly, I'm looking forward to achieving a huge step towards D's and my financial goal: to be debt-free and in a place where we can have the option of me being a stay-at-home mom (SAHM).  Having to take L to day care every day has been a huge motivator for me, although I'm not gonna lie - some mornings he's being a real butt and I'm happy to drop him off and be like "See ya!"  Not so much anymore, but definitely when he was younger.  Which makes me think that maybe I might be more suited to being a part-time SAHM. 

So now, we're on the fast-track to getting things ship-shape over here and ready to show to potential tenants.  Which means packing and moving out.  Ugh, please just shoot me now.

I took a vacation day to get the packing momentum going.  I was hoping I'd get like a fast current going, but I'd say that the "momentum" I've achieved is more like a calm, quiet river than anything.  It doesn't help that D has worked in packing and shipping capacities for much of his adult life and is mental over making sure the boxes are taped up to the point where they'd survive nuclear holocaust.  

Me and the tape "gun" (which I don't get why they're called that, they don't look like guns and they certainly aren't as easy to use....I've heard) are not friends whatsoever.  I never thought I could be such a total and utter failure at taping up boxes, but I am.  They are not pretty.  

But, I feel confident when I say that they will not be breaking open any time soon.  I packed up a box this morning, only to realize a few minutes later that I'd packed something I wanted to bring with me to my parents', so I tried to break into it to get it out, and it took 3 minutes of steady sawing with our fancy knives to break through that tape.  So maybe a little over-zealous with the tape.  D has taught me well.  But he is way better with the gun than I am.  When he's finished taping up a box, I half-expect him to blow on it and put it in a holster.  He's like a tape cowboy. 

So that's the big news on these fronts.  Expect a lot of interesting blog posts starting in July.  

Also, expect my mom to start a blog called "Memos From A Working Mom Of Adult Children Who Don't Know How To Move Out Permanently And Keep Coming Back To Suckle At The Teet Of My Hard Work" where she'll talk about how painful awesome it is to have me back under her roof.