Good Bye / Au Revior / Sianora, Sallie Mae!!!!

When I was at GracePoint church, a lady got involved named Sally May. I wanted to run and hide from her because I owed her money. Not anymore, we have finally kicked Sallie Mae out of our house! In so doing, we've complete step #2 of Dave Ramsey's Baby Steps.
But because I'm a hoarder by nature and we were saving for IVF and the adoption (neither of which ended up costing us much) we have also have 3 months worth of expenses in savings, putting us at the low end of completing baby step #3.

We're now contacting our Northwestern Mutual rep to work on baby step #4. But rather than investing 15% of your income into an IRA as Dave recommends, we're going to do 10%. We'll be following the 10/10/80 principle. Give 10% / Save 10% / Live on 80%.

Based upon Erin's current salary, we'll be able to move onto baby steps 5 and 6 fairly quickly, too. But that could change this fall when Erin hopefully starts working part-time.

One difference for us from the Dave Ramsey plan is that we continued investing into our Roth IRA during the debt snowball. I know he always says emotions and intensity trump interest rates, but it was hard to justify putting less in the stock market (which historically earns 10% rate of return) to pay off a student loan with only 3.2% interest. But looking back at this past year, maybe I should've followed his advice...