Day 97: Plugging Along

I haven’t had a lot to write about our debt payoff journey lately. As it stands, things are stagnant, but not, if that makes any sense.

I don’t have any big plans up my sleeve to eliminate half my debt overnight. I think we’ve made all of the big moves that we can, and now comes the time to follow through with our debt payoff plan. We just have to hammer away at it.

Effective my next paycheck, I will not be contributing to my 401(k). This is only a temporary bump, and I intend to start investing again in March when we receive our tax return. When we receive our tax return, we will be paying off three of our credit cards, eliminating nearly $300 a month in credit card payments. Once those three credit cards are paid off, our financial picture will look a lot brighter. I keep telling myself, “Six more months until we have some breathing room.” Not to say we’re going to go crazy with that breathing room, just that it will be a welcome change from our financial state for the past six months.

My husband is still a nonsmoker, for a month as of Wednesday, but he’s discouraged because we’re not seeing immediate financial returns on his quitting. I’ve tried explaining that we have benefited financially from it, because if it weren’t for him quitting, we’d be even further underwater with our bills than we are right now, but he wants to see positive growth in our savings account, not elimination of credit card spending.

I read financial articles every day, and see people complain that the economy isn’t getting any better and people are still broke. They blame the president, the banks, the realtors, but never seem to point the finger at themselves. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, knowing that we’ve lost $20,000 on our house in three years, knowing that we’re locked into a 6% interest rate, and we can’t get out of our home because we’ll never make back what we owe on it. But I don’t blame anybody else for our financial position except for myself. I don’t even blame my husband, because he told me three years ago that we should stay in an apartment and save money for a down payment, instead of putting nothing down on a house that we were only lukewarm on. Instead, I wanted out of an apartment, and here we sit.

I could blame the credit card companies for our outstanding financial debt load. They did, after all, increase our interest rates to 24%+ and convert our fixed cards to variable cards, but if we hadn’t used them irresponsibly in the first place, we wouldn’t have had as much debt for them to profit off of.

I could blame the student loan companies for not reigning in the amount of loans they were allowing me to take out, giving me more than three times tuition costs. I could blame the car company for selling us a lemon, or giving us a high interest loan…

You get the point.

But, it’s nobodies fault except ours. We’re the ones that got dollar signs in our eyes and thought we were made of money. The funny thing is, we’re not making anymore money than we were before. Our utilities are going up monthly. Our mortgage bill went up substantially, because of escrow. We’ve got a new, higher car payment, and a new higher insurance bill. And yet, we’re paying credit cards off. Funny how that can work, when you prioritize your spending, cut out fast food and cook at home, eliminate unnecessary shopping trips that you were only making for the sake of boredom. Looking at our financial picture, I am amazed how much money we were hemorrhaging.

Six months. It will only be six months until we have breathing room; until our credit cards aren’t maxed out, until we’re not scraping pennies just to make ends meet, until I can start sleeping at night without having nightmares of losing our home. Six months seems a long way off, but soon it will be Halloween, then Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.

Until then, I’ll just keep swimming.