This past weekend I went and did a very grownup thing. Part of me wants to make it super suspenseful and keep you all on edge, but I’ll just come right out and share. I walked into a furniture store and paid for a $2300 mattress outright. Now for many this may not be exciting at all but for me, this was kind of a big deal, especially since years ago this would have never been an option. This is called meeting a milestone.

You never really know you’ve met these milestones until they just happen. It’s when you realize everything is going right and the sacrifices your making aren’t in vain. Acknowledging milestones is a very big part of staying on course with your financial journey. It helps you to acknowledge how far you’ve come and how much further you may have to go.

Even though we aren’t debt free yet our life has changed in a pretty big way. We’re able to finally do things that people typically take for granted. We really needed a new mattress and had been talking about it for a while, but we kept putting it off. Finally, it got to the point where I just wasn’t sleeping well. I’d wake up exhausted.  Before Broke on Purpose® I would have been looking for a medium priced mattress something that I could live with but wasn’t exactly what I really wanted, or I would have been looking for a store that gave me the best option when it came to financing. I would have signed up for an offer giving me at least 36 months to pay it off with no interest. In full disclosure, I never knew how expensive mattresses were until we went to test them out. When the salesman told me the price I jumped up so quick you’d think I’d just got caught cheating.  To save up for this mattress purchase we’d been putting money aside in one of our online Capital One 360 Savings accounts so while we had the money, I didn’t go into this expecting to spend this much.

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Could we have gone with an online option, sure but because I knew that this was something we were going to have to fully commit to so it was very important for me to be able to test out the mattresses and compare them to other mattresses at the same time? I didn’t think it practical or the best investment of our time to buy one online, sleep on it for a few weeks only to decide that maybe we should have gone with the other option even though we had no idea how that other option felt.

The moral of this story is that we’ve reached a level in our financial journey where we’re able to finally start to think about what we want next in our life and things beyond paying off our debt. For many people becoming debt free isn’t their ultimate goal. Some just want to live a financially comfortable life where they can do things like oh say purchase an expensive mattress. I don’t want to be one of those people that finally reaches debt-free status only to find that I’m nowhere near being prepared for life after debt. Forgoing putting money towards retirement to pay off debt no longer makes sense to me, especially when you think about how much money you could be missing out on with the power of compound. This is why, to answer the question of many inquiring minds, we are no longer doing debt payoff reports. We’re currently allocating our money in too many different directions for us to do a true debt payoff report

We’re meeting milestones every day. What milestone have you recently met that you didn’t realize until it happened?