I haven't written in a while. I have started writing several entries, but then gotten distracted and closed them out without saving.
I think the last time I wrote, I had just gotten a great promotion, and was excited for what that meant for our finances.Well, what it ended up meaning is that we had more money to spend on random things that popped up and not so much on our debt. We had to pay for a plumber to come out when we had water in our basement, then twice we had to have a heating and cooling company come out for our A/C. We also went on vacation in June, so that set us back too. Right now, we're pretty much where we were when I got this job because we just can't seem to stop spending.
I'm mostly writing tonight because I've been juggling our debt, trying to make it easier to pay it off. I told my husband that I want to really focus on paying debt down from now through the end of the year.
Everybody I work with was told last week that they're out of a job at the end of the year. I still have a job, but they're centralizing work in our company and next year could be a different story. I'd rather get us in a place that if I lost my job next year, we wouldn't be struggling to stay afloat. My husband has also told me that he's not sure how much longer he's going to be able to continue to do his current job. It is physically demanding and 20+ years of the same type of work has left him feeling physically broken down. I dread the day that he calls and tells me that he can no longer work. He's already hurt his back this year.
So back to me juggling, we have a lot of credit card debt. We can't seem to stop spending, and really, the only way we were able to pay off a huge chunk of debt earlier this year was by having the debt on it's own credit card with a 0% balance transfer rate, so now that we've paid that off, I'm transferring more balances. I actually applied for another credit card, the Chase Slate card, for their 0% balance transfer offer and transferred part of my balances there. I'm also planning to transfer my balance on my 7.99% credit card to a 0% balance transfer card, although it has a 3% balance transfer fee, it still saves me over $900 in the 18 months that it's 0% interest. I'm hoping that by isolating this debt, and moving towards a more cash based budget, we'll be able to pay off all of our existing credit card debt by time the 0% offers expire.
I'm starting to feel a lot of anxiety because I'm having to do so much juggling. I talk to my husband constantly about what we need to do to get out of debt, but he feels like since we've been talking about it constantly for years and not actually gotten anywhere, that it's never going to work. I feel like as long as he and I are not on the same page, it's not going to work. It's very frustrating to be on different pages when it come to finances with my husband because I feel like we're in a canoe and rowing in opposite directions. I know it's going to be hard to change our spending habits; I love to go out to eat and he loves to buy comic books and we both like to randomly go shopping on the weekends to fight boredom. It's hard to change those habits when we've done them for so long, but I can't imagine what it would be like to lose my job and just be on a sinking ship. We'd lose everything if we don't get stuff paid off.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a brief recap. I'm going to wait until all of my balance transfers go through, and then take a look at what it's going to take to pay all of this debt off.
