#thedertings

all thats left of the old box!  happy thursday..... 2 posts in 1 week, i may just become an influencer before the summer is over------haha! i do wish i knew influencing people with your own words would make you a paycheck 11 years ago when i started this blog, but i was a little too early to the game.... now onto why i am here again this week..... over the last year-ish our lights in the house would flicker off and on randomly----never knew when, didn't last long and honestly (clearly) we blew it off. i did look it up a few times when it was really annoying and found, maybe its a bad bulb, maybe a factory close by sucking all the power (we do have a factory or 2 near by, so we ignored).  then fall-ish our 6 year old LG (pretty expensive) fridge started freezing up. so we would have to take everything out and put the hairdryer in it to solve the issue of thawing out, then it would stop for a while and then randomly do it again----we have babied it to avoid buying a new thousand...

happy summer friends! i hope you all are enjoying the sunshine and doing or planning some fun things for summer 2021! i wanted to jot down some things that we have learned along the way with traveling on a budget.... if you know the dertings, you know that life is budgeted---(something somewhat funny happened friday night in vegas, i will share in a bit).  some do's for us: *we travel 5 days max! we do travel often on weekends thanks to family in SC & FL (those trips because of our peeps cover room and board)---- we do love to travel, but being gone for more than 5 days is too much for us! our most recent adventure we left monday morning at 7am (arrived at 9am in vegas) and came home saturday morning (left vegas at midnight)----so only 4 nights of hotels were needed! *we booked our plane tickets using air miles----we got miles 3 years ago when we each applied for an american airlines credit card (those cards are now closed with no balance)------with covid however----we shifted ...

 here we are again! its 2.10----the day in 2012 my life changed, you probably know the background story by now.....brooks "found" my secret debt-----over $30,000! yep not $3,000---$30,000! it is hard to believe its been almost 10 years since we started this debt free journey.... i always come back to this day because of how defining it was for us (me) back then and how its carried over to now...we have made a lot of dreams come true by this now blessing that happened 9 years ago! had he not found all of my lies and secrets....we may honestly not have our house or possibly our marriage. i know some think its crazy to share something like debt---money woes, whatever you want to call it, but for me its a testimony to what 1/2 of americans (maybe more than 1/2) are living with! believe me i learned real quick how easy it was to swipe a card and keep going----the hard part is not swiping a card and truly contemplating if i really need something! when i say debt free--- i should cl...