I'm in a grumbly sort of mood tonight. Something about the fact that I paid the bills today has put me in a bad mood. I know what it is - it's debt.
Now, 6 years ago we had nothing. Brian was in a government retraining program going to school, I had a baby, a toddler and a preschooler. We lived in a little duplex and lived a rather modest life. And we also had no debt.
Fast forward to today, when I got to seriously looking at things. I was looking at where we are in our life, where we want to be and what we need to do to get there. And the first thing that popped out at me was this - we are in debt. Serious debt.
I'm not talking about the housepayments or the car payments, I'm not talking about anything that I think is reasonable like that. I'm talking about plain old credit card debt. How did we get in this deep? Seriously! It's like a vacuum sucking our money each month and there seems to be no way out.
Now, in the scheme of things debt isn't that bad. Everyone is healthy, we have a happy family and we really do love our life. But nagging in the back of my head is this debt thing.
So I realize that I need to do something. And since working right now is really out of the question, at least until Brian comes back from Academy, I've decided to do whatever I can to work on that debt.
So the first order of business - I removed all the credit cards from my wallet. Poof, gone. They are now sitting somewhere waiting for me to do something with them. Someone mentioned freezing them, which I may do. I may just cut them up, except for one to use in emergencies. But from here on out I am not going to USE them.
Secondly - pay them off. Now this part is going to be trickier, especially considering Brian just took a big pay cut. But what I can do is dedicate all our "extra" money to paying them down. Now, this isn't exactly going to be easy. I doubt if there will be an "extra" money from paychecks any time soon. But we will be getting a decent tax return that will be dedicated solely to paying debt.
Thirdly - I will get a job. I know this won't be anytime in the near future, but it is coming. The plan is for me to start working after Carissa starts full-time school in September. And while I know we will want to spend some of that money, I also know that I can dedicate at least half of what I make to paying off debt.
So there you go, that's my personal debt pay-off plan. I'm going to do my best to follow it and hopefully, not too far in the future, we will once again be debt free.
4 comments:
If you decide to cut up your cards, be sure and cancel them with the companies as well. Good luck with this. People laugh at us when we refuse to open credit accounts, but we learned we don't handle it well, and we manage without it. We're almost to the no debt stage (other than house), and then it's working on the "savings" thing.
Annette, I would be so bad with CC's, I ONLY use my debit card and make sure I always have the money in my personal account first. Good luck with it though!
Linda
Great plan, Annette! I feel ya on the debt. We also took all the cc's out of our wallets. I used the "emergency" one around xmas time so there goes that! It's tough. Don't let it stress you out too much... life is too short to worry about money. As long as you are taking a responsible stand, everything will turn out in the end.
Sis,
Just a though, you should look into a home equity loan. It will carry a much lower interest rate and the interest is tax deductible. Could help you get out of debt much quicker.
Bro
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