Exploring St. Louis

As you know, Darren and I have lived in STL for a while now, and we have started to run out of new things to do.  When we have friends who come to visit for the second time, we want to make sure to show them sights of our city that they haven't previously seen... so, we got to try out a few new places this past weekend when our college friends Robert & Tessa came!

The first thing we made sure to do was take them to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game at Busch Stadium. With the Cards fighting for the top position in the NL Central and October's post season madness hurriedly heading our way, there hasn't been a better time to catch America's favorite game.  We tried something new by travelling on the Metro to get to the game, and enjoyed some free soda while watching the Cards vs the Brewers.  We may not have won, but it was still super fun to get out and be part of the spirit cheering on the Cardinals.

Our seats may have been high, but they gave us a great view of the entire field!

Carissa joined in the fun, despite being a Cubs fan

R&T at their first Cardinals game

On Friday after work I joined up with everyone to visit two of our favorite lesser-known attractions, Lone Elk Park and the World Bird Sanctuary.  Both of these are free (donations accepted) and house some rather unusual animals.  Lone Elk Park is a drive-through exhibit (with some hiking trails as well) that showcases elk (who would've guessed?), deer, and bison.  Just down the road from that, the bird sanctuary has various species of rare birds as well as some reptiles.  Tessa even found a parrot that would play peek-a-boo with her (and I caught it on video!). 

We found this to be hilarious.

The elk were rather exciting to watch

I enjoy driving through this forest

One of the huge owls 

Cool logo

After a delicious lunch at Favazza's on the Hill, Tessa and Robert asked to visit a site that Darren and I had never seen before- the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.  Even though I have toured my fair share of cathedrals in Europe, this one's majestic mosaics and colorful artwork really captured my attention.  Since I am not of the Catholic faith, being in such an ornate building would prove to be rather distracting during worship because I am just fascinated by how intricately everything is decorated.  From the expected stained glass windows to the smallest little cherub sculptures nestled under the pulpit stand, every single item in that church was made intentionally beautiful. 

This was a really cool statue outside in a prayer garden

On Saturday we took them up to Eckert's in Grafton, IL to pick some apples. If you have never had the opportunity to go pick your own fruit from an orchard, whether apples or peaches or anything, I highly recommend it! It's usually very inexpensive and such a fun experience. Darren and I had been apple picking last summer and thoroughly enjoyed it. We chose this particular farm in Grafton because we knew they had a petting zoo (with a camel!) and a cute little country store. 

Tessa bravely fed the creepy goats

on our way to the apples!

I would call them expert apple pickers

Enjoying the beautiful weather

Finally, for our last adventure in the Lou for the weekend, we all explored the Crystal City Underground and played lasertag inside a cavern!  The drive was rather creepy since we waited until dusk to locate the very-difficult-to-find attraction, but it was all worth it after we crossed the single-lane bridge over a steamy swamp and through the dusty tunnel to get to one of the best kept secrets in STL.  We accidentally gave ourselves a full tour of the caverns before locating our lasertag spot, and enjoyed a friendly competitive game of couple versus couple (3 couples total) sport.  When we finished playing, we sat near the live jazz band and played card games while still inside the cavern. It even looks like they host sand volleyball tournaments down there! Super cool.

R&T ready to rock and roll

The winning team!

Carissa and Brian by a random aztec-y wall?

We were extremely happy to host our friends and visit all sorts of places around town.  Thanks to Robert and Tessa for braving yet another trip to stay with us in the Lou, we hope you had a fantastic time!

We are the Aggies, the Aggies are We

To celebrate being out of debt, Darren and I budgeted for a little "play" money that we decided to put towards our fall garden.

Last fall, after having moved out to the suburbs, I realized that THE flower to plant this time of year was the ever-glorious mum.  Golds, oranges, crimsons, and whites were popping up all over as the air turned crisp and football season got underway.  I knew that when the time came, I would plant mums in my own garden this year.

We've been lucky enough to have a pretty mild summer this year (no worries, I've heard rumors that we are supposed to get a bitterly cold winter to make up for it).  That being said, we had a nice little preview of fall for a few weeks in August that made me want to don a sweater and start sipping hot tea.  With all of the fall excitement, I knew it was time to start planning our mum garden.

The thing I love about mums is how lusciously full they get.  Planted correctly, you could have your entire garden covered in thick, healthy blooms all bundled up next to each other.  Even though the golds and oranges were tempting colors for fall, we knew we wanted to stick with what we knew: maroon and white.

So, on our celebration date night, we went to the store and picked out enough maroon and white mums to completely upgrade our garden out front.  It took two shifts of sweaty, dirty work breaking up the clay and pulling out everything from old bricks to nails, but it was worth all of that effort!

I can't wait them to bloom to their fullest potential! I will have to update you all on how they look in a few weeks.

Tackling Student Loans

Howdy!

Some of you may have seen my post on facebook earlier this week which announced that Darren and I had paid off all of our student debt.  We are very excited about reaching this goal, and especially since we completed it a few months earlier than planned.

As most of you know, we haven't had the most stable financial situation since we've been married, so money topics were not ones we enjoyed talking about after we said, "I do."  The more we read, the more we realized that getting our finances in order would not only be smart, but would also provide a sense of peace when paying bills, planning events, and basically any transaction that involved spending money.

Fortunately, we found a church that we had started to like just before it began a Crown Financial Peace Course.  This course taught the basics of budgeting, all Biblically based with the emphasis on the fact that we are stewards of the money God blesses us with.  That course, starting in January, taught us how to take our income and divide it among the things we had to pay (rent), the things we need (groceries), the things we want (dinner out), and the emergencies (flat tire, ER visit).

I bought a binder with tabs (one for each month) and used a few Pinterest posts as inspiration to create our own budget documents.  Every single transaction, whether cash, check, or card, was documented and then divided among each category.  We allowed ourselves to have some room for fun (entertainment budget) and some room for unplanned things (medical budget).  I find writing everything by hand to be extremely helpful because it makes you think twice before splurging on those adorable shoes at Target or ordering pizza for dinner because you don't feel like cooking.

After 3 months of the Crown Financial course, our class began a Dave Ramsey course using his book the Complete Guide to Money.  Dave goes over baby steps to financial success and Darren and I decided to do these, mostly in order, to achieve our goals.  The one thing we did differently was instead of doing baby step 1 of an emergency fund of $1000, we went ahead and skipped to doing the emergency fund that would last us 6 months.  This way, if something happened to my job we would be able to survive reasonably for 6 months.

One of our most important goals was paying off student loans.  Without getting into details, we had five different loans with five different interest rates.  We used Dave's snowball method, which means you focus in on one debt while paying minimum on the others.  In our case, we chose to pay off the loan with the highest interest rate first.  This way, we paid off one loan in its entirety before moving on to "attack" the next loan.  At the end of each month, any extra money that we didn't use was put toward the loan. Every. Last. Penny.  You see, since we had the 6 month emergency fund, we knew our savings account was fine until we reached this goal.

I would say that the best part about this whole process was the peace that it brought when we wanted to splurge a little.  Before, we had no idea how much money we'd already spent eating out that month and felt bad if we thought we had gone out too often.  Now, we knew exactly how much we allowed ourselves to use and when we got to the end of the month and had a little left, we would go out and ENJOY it completely guilt free.  We did the same when buying new clothes, purchasing new guest bath towels,  and splurging on the expensive brand of cookie mix at the store.  It was budgeted for that purpose, so it was okay to use it whichever way we chose to.

One of my other favorite categories that we put together was our "personal" budget.  This can be according to your income, but for us we decided that we each get $25 a month to use as we please.  I could save up and get my hair highlighted, Darren could save every penny for something special, etc.  We also gave each other an additional $50 when it was the other person's birthday month to be used for cake supplies, dinner out, or a gift. It's money that is ours to spend without having to consult the other person, because ALL other purchases are mutual agreements.  I remember someone suggesting this back when we were in marriage prep classes, and I HIGHLY recommend it.

I have Word documents of generic versions of our budget sheets if any of you are interested in starting this process yourselves.  There's nothing quite like knowing exactly where all of your money is going, and feeling like you're completely on top of it. If there is anything I can do to help you reach your goals, let me know! This process has literally changed our lives and how we look at money, and we are so much happier because of it.