Life.Currenttoday.com - 2 Cents

My parents never had a credit card.
I met, and married my wife in 1982. Her parents had only had a gas card.

We didn’t have much money. We were poor college students. Our gross income was less than $15,000. Life was good.

We had our daughter in the middle of my junior year. It was financially tough. And, one just has to have home movies of the kids when they’re small. Sears had this great video camera. It was a freak by today’s standards, but it was great for the early 1980’s. We charged it on the Sears Credit card. When we signed up, we got some free pans. It was a good deal. We could pay it off at our convenience.

We got a new color TV that Christmas. There was this great new technology that would really help with school. There was Commodore, Atari, and Apple to choose from too.

My wife had to have an operation. It wasn’t covered by her new insurance yet. That was expensive. We needed new tires for the car at the same time. And, Christmas came around every year. We had to cover a huge expense when we moved to another state.

We bought a house. The car broke down. Another Christmas rolled around. We paid off another credit card with a new one with lower interest.

Ok, I won’t detail every year of our last 24 married years of bliss. I think you get the picture. One thing led to another along with some bad choices. That and the need to have what we wanted as soon as we could get it finally had us paying more for credit card debt than anything else in our lives.

Let me just say we had over $90,000.00 in non-secured credit card debt. We were making good money, but living from paycheck to paycheck. Finally, one day, it all broke. By our best calculations we had 2 months before we would go under–totally under.

We sought help with debt consolidation. At the end of the day, we just couldn’t do that. They actually told us they usually dealt with people who were already behind in their payments. We needed to quit paying our credit cards until they were behind. Then, they would approach each card with a take it or leave it deal. We would only be responsible for about 15% - 20% of our original debt by the time they were done dealing with our creditors.

I won’t judge anyone who had to take that route. I’m thankful we didn’t have to do so.

What did we do? Well, our house had a lot of equity. We were able to get a first mortgage that covered a lot of the debt. A second mortgage made it where we could breathe again. Finally, we cut up every credit card we ever had.

That was just over 2 years ago.

We have paid the remaining items off, one by one.

Now, we actually have a plan to be totally debt free. We won’t owe on anything but the house in another 2 years. And, we plan to have that paid off in another 5 years after that. So, we’ll be totally debt free in 7 years. We only have a debit card. We save for anything we get.

By comparison, we live like king and queen now. I just had to pay over $1000.00 to fix one of the vehicles this last month. We didn’t touch savings. We didn’t touch a card. I paid for it out of checking–not even savings–and still had twice what I needed to pay our bills. And that’s even with doubling up on the remaining debt.

So, don’t you dare be stupid like we were.

You know when I use a card now? When I can get 0% interest for something I have to get anyway. I divide the amount into the months before it is due and set up my automatic on-line bill pay. I got tires last year that way for three vehicles.

Credit cards? Cut them up. Tear them up. Bury them. They will destroy your life.

You can truly enjoy a happy life when you live debt free. Learn to work for what you have. After you save for it and finally get it you actually enjoy it even more. It becomes fulfilling in a way you never expected.

Regards.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 2:24 am and is filed under Work, Finance, debt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.