How We Paid Off $50,000 in 33 Months with a Debt Avalanche

There is one thing that pisses me off about financial savings articles, and that is the recap of a saver’s journey.

The articles generally start with the person in question sharing their debt load, the plan they followed, and skips to the fact that they became debt free because of it X years later. That’s great, but what is missing is the many years of hard work and commitment that it took to make the goal become a reality.

When boiled down to 500 words it sounds amazing that someone can pay off a big debt in a “short” period of time. We could do this in talking about how we paid off $50,000 in student loan and car debt in 33 months, but there is a little secret no one ever shares: those months or years in the middle suck.

While articles tend to shrug this off as being part of the very nature of this method (which is true), a period of several years is still a huge chunk of time. And that in-between time does not go by as quick as you’d like while large sums of money disappear every single paycheck.

But I am here to tell you today to not get discouraged- it is worth it. You just need to know a few things along the way that others are not so eager to tell you about.

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6 Things to Know Before Planning a Trip to Visit Cuba

People often say that a trip to visit Cuba is like going back in time, and while this may just seem like an expression used to degrade the Cuban government, we have to say that this one is actually a fairly spot on assessment.

We visited Havana for a long weekend, and learned quite a bit about what it is like to travel to this unique island nation in the Caribbean.

So come along on a journey with us, as we’re about to transport you back in time with a few things you need to know before you travel to Cuba.

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A Tale of Two Cubas – Did We Really Have Fun Visiting There?

I want to tell you that we had a great time traveling in CubaI really do.

I’d like nothing more than to write a glowing summary about how much fun we had exploring the museums and forts of Havana, eating at the city’s numerous restaurants, and exploring the tobacco fields during our day trip to Vinales.

And, in a way, we did enjoy the trip because of all of these things.

But I hesitate to elaborate on this further because of one very simple reason. There are two different Cubas, and only looking at the one for tourists would paint the country in the wrong lens.

If you’re going to visit, you have to understand the bigger picture.

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A Sincere Apology to La Sagrada Familia from a Skeptic

On our recent visit to Barcelona, there was one attraction I had no interest in seeing.  In fact, you could say that I was dreading going but knew that as a thorough travel writer I would have to eventually. 

That attraction was Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia cathedral, and I am happy to report that everything I had ever thought about the still-being-built church was dead wrong. 

That horribly ugly looking building is actually quite a beautiful sight indeed and is probably the best of what there is to see in Barcelona!

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