Brunette Getting Out of Debt's Personal Financ

I submitted my resignation yesterday. It's crazy to even type that! I will miss my school, my students, and co-workers, but am very excited for the adventures that await us!

We traveled to Tennessee over the weekend last weekend and drove all over Eastern Tennessee looking at houses. We met with two different realtors in two different areas and found a home we couldn't get out of our heads. We saw the home on Friday with the realtor, drove by it again by ourselves on Saturday, and asked to see it again before we flew home on Sunday. We prayerfully and thoughtfully decided to put an offer on that home, and once our offer was formally submitted, it was accepted 5 hours later!

The seller was asking $599,900 and we offered $580,000. We offered to close in as few as 15 days or as many as 45 depending on what the seller would prefer. She was also offering extra acreage at only $15.000 an acre. However, with moving to a new state and never having lived in the country before and not knowing how much work it will be or how much it costs, added to the fact that I won't be working (at least initially) we didn't feel like we could comfortably buy extra acreage now, so we added an addendum to our offer asking to be able to purchase upto 3 more acres within 18 months. We also said we would not ask for any repairs to be performed unless repairs totaled more than $10,000. We think it was a fair offer and a good price. Happily, the seller agreed!

Next week my husband is flying into Tennessee for a quick 24 hour trip to be there for the inspection and to take measurements.  Earnest money has been sent and now we wait.

That's not entirely true. Now we can intentionally start packing and figuring out moving options. Not all moving companies deliver to all areas of TN so we needed to know where we would end up so we could contact moving companies. We have already gotten several quotes and are making plans. 

It's crazy to think that we only have 6 weeks left living in California, but we are so excited (and nervous) for this new adventure. The next 6 weeks are going to be crazy busy but so worth it.

Please pray or send all your good vibes to us that inspections go well and everything rolls along smoothly!

Things have been crazy busy lately. We took on a foreign exchange student from Belgium back in December whom we love, but is has added one more layer to our already hectic lives!

We sold our house in the only state we've ever known to move across the country to the unknown. Our house has closed and we are technically renters for the next two months... and also homeless (because we haven't found anything yet).

We have even had a very difficult time getting back to look at homes because of things going on in California (mainly with or for our foreign exchange daughter but we wouldn't change it for the world, we love her!).

In May alone, we have had: a work trip for my husband, a Kentucky Derby party, my birthday, Mother's Day, our daughter's birthday, our anniversary, a trip back to Tennessee, a trip down to Universal Studios, senior night for our exchange student, a district art show for our exchange student, I had to present at our district board meeting for my school, a going away party for our exchange daughter, several graduation parties for friends and family, and probably several things I can't think of right now.... life has been crazy!

We took a whirlwing 4 day trip to Tennessee this past weekend and visited 13 homes all over the eastern part of the state. We think we narrowed in on one and are now deciding on the offer we want to make. We want to get the house, but we don't want to overpay. We want to get the house, but we don't want to be housepoor when all is said and done. We have been running a lot of numbers (and are very thankful to our lender who has answered all of our questions and keeps rejigging the numbers for us!)

I have worked at my job for the last 18 years and it is crazy that I am saying goodbye to the only school I have ever worked at!

Finances have taken a back seat.  We are paying all of our bills and not accruing any more debt, but debt payoff has been slower than we want.  Luckily, most of our bills are on autopilot so they haven't taken up to much headspace. 

Sorry this post is all over the place, but that is how my life feels right now, too.

I will turn 45 this coming week. It has been fun to look back at our mistakes and progress over the last 25 years. Here is the last installment of our money journey. 

Age 40 – 45

Our forever home ended up not being our forever home. But only because we are planning to move out of state. (If we were going to stay in California, we wouldn’t ever leave this house.)

Upgrading our house also upgraded our mortgage and our monthly bills. We could mostly afford it. We were not living quite as paycheck to paycheck as we had about 2 months of bare bones expenses in the bank, but we also had $13,000 of credit card debt. From ages 40 – 43, that debt yo-yoed. We got our debt as low as $9000 and it ballooned up to almost $25000. Being $25000 in credit card debt was finally the kick in the pants we needed to address our debt and our spending habits. (Don’t ask us why it took so long because we can’t tell you… other than that we were dumb!)

2 years ago, we really started to make a concerted effort to get out of credit card debt. We started adequately funding our sinking funds and our retirement. We started cash flowing all of our expenses. We decided if we couldn’t cash flow it, we didn’t need it. (That was a huge adjustment to just swiping a credit card!) And we have made progress.  We currently owe about $8500 in credit card debt, down from a high of $24,907.  We have a plan to have it paid off by May 30. Most of that was through payments, not windfalls. We also changed our habits. I will get a stipend check on May 10^th for about $1800 for coaching soccer that will all go towards debt. Then, on May 20^th, I will get a retro check because our negotiated raise is back dated to July 1^st, for around $4000. That too, will all go to debt. Lastly, because we sold our house, we won’t have a June house payment and half of our normal mortgage payment will finish paying off our credit card and the other half will go into savings.

2 years ago, we also started giving regularly to our church. Prior to that, our giving was very sporadic and only “when we had money”, which really translates into not very often. “Giving” is very important to us. We give monthly to our church, we purchase Christmas presents every year for two local charity organizations, we purchase and pack boxes for Samaritan’s Purse, and we volunteer regularly at our church.  We don’t think it is a coincidence that our financial fortunes started to turn when we made a concerted effort to be more generous with our time, treasures, and talents.

We only have a small emergency fund of $2000 right now, but we have 1 month of bare bones expenses in cash/sinking funds. We don’t have a big emergency fund (yet) but we aren’t living totally paycheck to paycheck either. Our debt continues to decrease, and our savings continues to increase.

After putting this all on paper, I see so many mistakes we’ve made, as well as a few bright spots along the way. I feel like most of our retirement mistakes were made earlier in our career, cashing out 401ks and pensions. Now, we are pushing hard to save enough for a comfortable retirement and are putting a good chunk of our pre-tax income into retirement every month because we are trying to play catch up. (I put 23% of my pre-tax income into retirement and The Husband was putting 19% (including his 401K match and profit sharing) but with his most recent raise it is now at 22%.) But I feel like our biggest credit card mistakes came in our late 30s and early 40s. We should have known better but we chose to keep our heads in the sand for far too long. However, as I’ve said many times before, we are making progress and we will get out of credit card debt!

It's been a rocky journey and we learned some difficult lessons. More than learning them, we’ve put them into practice. Hopefully this time next year, I can write another post explaining how we manage our finances now that we are credit card debt free and aggressively saving! This time next year we will be in a new state, with a new house, and paying new bills. It will be so interesting to see where we are.

It has been really fun and eye opening to look back at the choices and mistakes we’ve made over the last 25 years of our life. 

Here is part 2 of our money journey.

At this point in our life, things changed a little bit because I went to work full-time in my profession as opposed to working part time in retail. In some ways, things improved, in others they stayed the same, and in yet others, they got worse.

Age 28 – 32

At this point, I went to work full-time as a teacher. We didn’t have to pay for day care as my mom watched our kids. But the kids were also getting older and getting involved in more activities.

This is when we pretty much stopped adding to our debt, as I was making more money, but we didn’t make much progress on it either.

We were able to pay cash for almost everything we needed or bought, but our payments towards debt were minimal. We made payments and, in fact, even made small dents in the debt, but we never really made much progress. We were treading water and still living paycheck to paycheck. We didn’t put any money into savings and were not actively contributing to our retirement, other than what was involuntarily taken out of my paycheck. The Husband was still working for the same large company and they did offer a pension plan the he was fully vested in.

Age 32 – 37

At this point, The Husband switched jobs. Leaving a stable company in the middle of the Great Recession was crazy in my book, but we prayed about it and really felt like it was the best option for our family.

He got a huge pay raise but took a cut in his vacation time. It was a trade-off we were willing to make.

Because he was fully vested in his pension at his old job, we decided to cash that out to pay off our credit card debt and be able to start fresh.

With the pay raise, we were able to travel more and start doing major home renovations. We were able to pay for these all with cash. We charged a lot on our credit card each month but had no problem paying the balance in full every month.

Although we were living within our means, we were JUST living within our means. We did contribute to our retirements, but we didn’t put anything in savings for “today”. We didn’t save for a rainy day and were still living paycheck to paycheck. This would eventually come back to bite us when we decided to remodel the kitchen at our old house.

Up to this point, all of the remodeling we had done was paid for in full by the end of the project. We were able to cash flow everything. We didn’t understand how expensive a kitchen remodel would really be. We charged everything, just as we had done in years past, but everything was so expensive, that we couldn’t pay it off each month. And the balance started to grow.

It grew to over $13000. (Small aside here. We also had a balance on another credit card that we were paying off slow and steady. The balance had gotten down to a little over $4000 so I took money that should have gone towards our kitchen remodel and put it towards paying off the other card. It didn’t change our debt total, just the way our debt was structured.)

For us, this really became a period of two steps forward and one step back.

At the end of our kitchen remodel, we decided to sell our house. (There were many factors that played into this decision, I swear!) We were back in credit card debt, still had virtually no savings, and had learned nothing from cashing out a small 401k and a large pension. We sacrificed out future to payoff our past and still wound up in the same situation because there was no work involved in paying off our debt. We had no discipline and did not change any of our behaviors.

Stay tuned for part three and the (likely) final installment of our money journey.

Years ago, I was reading another, now defunct, blog and I loved a post she wrote. As she just took a walk down memory lane, she wrote about life and her financial journey; I thought I’d do the same for my upcoming 45^th birthday.

She only wrote about her last decade; I think I’ll write about my last two and half decades. This is going to be long so I will split it into a few separate posts.  I’ll write about ages 20 – 27 and then from 28 – 37 and 38 – 45.

At age 20, I was living at home and attending community college. My parents couldn’t afford to help me financially, so I was on the hook for all college expenses myself. (*Note, I was able to live at home, rent-free and that in itself is a form of major help!) I played soccer and my coach there really liked me and helped me to get a full-ride athletic scholarship.  I lived at school from ages 21 – 22 and left college debt free. At the same time, The Husband lived at home and worked at a crummy job that paid tuition reimbursement, so he also left college debt free.

Age 22 – 25

I moved home when my athletic eligibility ran out, not because I couldn’t have finished my education, but because I was so homesick, I was ready to be home. By this time, my dad had retired and ironically made more money retired than he made working so he was able to help me financially with the rest of my school.

While I was away at school, The Husband graduated college and got a job working in IT for a large, Bay Area-based company. It was close to home and the most money he had ever made.

Also, 5 months after moving back home, The Husband and I got married. We got married on the (relatively) cheap… before it was trendy to do so. We spent $7500 on our entire wedding: dress/tux, venue, DJ, flowers, food, photographer, everything. However, we didn’t have the money to do that at the time. We cashed out a small 401K The Husband had had to pay for the wedding.

We moved in with my parents while I finished college and got my credential.

We also had our first child.

Age 25 – 27

We lived with my parents for just over two years.

Then we bought our first house. We had no money in savings and no down payment. No problem, right?

We borrowed $6000 from my sister and her husband to “have in the bank” as savings when we bought our house.

At this time mortgage companies were doing lots of shady things and because we had good credit, we qualified for a 0% down, interest only, variable rate loan. In fact, we had two loans: one at 80% and one at 20%, both interest only.

When we bought our home, we didn’t buy more than we could afford, however, we had all these new bills we’d never had to pay before and I was only working retail 50%. I worked 2 days one week and three days the next. Any money we needed over and above our earnings was put on the credit card.

Our credit cards were nearly maxed out and we were living paycheck to paycheck. We had to pay my sister and brother-in-law back and money was tight. We were never late on any bills and never went over the limit on our credit card, but our financial situation was rough!

Stay tuned for part 2 of our money journey… I know you are riveted and can’t wait. 😊

This debt update is based on our most recent credit card statement which posted on 4/16/24. I do this mid-month because our credit card closes on the 15th. I can't wait until we are credit card debt free! Once we are credit card debt free, I will start doing updates at the beginning of the month. We still have other debts. Recently, we bought a car so now we have a car payment, we are also in the process of moving and will still have a mortgage. Once we move and are fully settled, I will do new debt updates based on those debts as well as savings updates on our savings progress. But those updates are a while off because I have still have credit card debt and we haven’t moved yet!

As always, we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, but I am happy to say that our debt decreased again; not by as much as I would have liked this month, but it never does. However, a decrease is a decrease!

Here is our current credit card debt total:

            $8490.08 at 19.99% interest  

Our total credit card debt stands at: $8490.08 That’s still a lot of debt, but we have seen more progress in the last 20 months than we have seen in the last 9 years. All we can do is just keep plugging away. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the light is getting bigger and brighter every month.

Plus side: Our debt decreased! We have the least amount of credit card debt that we have had in several years! We paid off $1111.10 of credit card debt (after interest); that amounts to almost 12% of our current debt. And we have paid off 66% of our total debt from our high of almost $25,000! The amount of interest we pay monthly has decreased by over $185 per month from its peak!

Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never enough. Of course, interest, interest, interest – that will always be a down side, and we still have a ways to go before we are out of credit card debt! This is ended up being a spendy month and if it weren’t for The Husband’s extra paycheck, we would have paid down almost nothing from out debt.

Looking forward to: having the lowest credit card debt we have had in over 9 years and ontinued progress on our debt. Next month's total will be the lowest credit card debt we have had in probably 20 years where we actually have worked to pay off the debt as opposed to  cashing out a pension or 401k. We have paid off our debt through budgeting and hard work!  This feels like accomplishment! My district voted on our raise and now we are waiting for the county office to issue it and then to get our retro checks. Mine should be around $4000 and it will almost all go towards our debt! Those payments won’t be issued until late May, but I’m very excited to be able to use that towards debt. I will also get a small stipend for coaching soccer of about $1700 and that will all go towards our debt, too! My soccer stipend should come before our next billing cycle closes while my retro check will not come until after it closes.

I feel really good about our progress and am looking forward to knocking our credit card debt out in the next couple of months.

I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful, and beyond successful!

We put our house on the market 2 weeks ago. We had our first open house last weekend and are supposed to hear from our realtor regarding offers today.

Holy cow!

The idea to move started during and because of Covid. As I chose not to get the Covid shot, I was told I would lose my job and not be able to work in California. That has since changed, but the idea to move continued to grow.

We are very lucky that my husband's job has approved him to work fully remote and out of state. He will keep his same salary and in fact get a raise because we are moving to a state without a state imcome tax.

We are nervous. We are excited. We are scared.

Both my husband and I have lived our entire lives in California so leaving will be a big change. We will be leaving our family and friends, but our kids (both young adults) are moving with us and they are now the main catalyst for the move. 

We have no idea exactly how this is going to affect our finances, only that it will.

We will make a good chunk of money off of our house, somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 before commissions and fees. Our debt will be $5000 or less by the time, or not long after, escrow closes (I will receive my retro check on 5/20 and I get a stipend for coaching; those will be close to $6,000 combined), so we will finish paying that off. But other than that, the rest of the money will be sunk into a new home.

We are hoping to buy some land and have a mortgage smaller than what we have now. As of right now, it is undecided if I will work or not. There is a strong chance I will no longer work in education. I have also been offered a fully remote job, again making a California salary, but I don't know if is something I want to pursue or not.

Our lives are very up in the air right now so I am trying to keep a very tight lid on our finances. I am checking bank accounts and credit card accounts daily. I am constantly reworking the budget to see how much debt we could pay off or how much we can put into our home repair/furniture and appliances envelope, as we know those will be used in a move.

As of right now, everythis is still hypothetical. We need to make enough money off of our current house to make a move feasible so that depends on what sort of offers we get.  I guess we should know more tonight. 

Last year when we filed our taxes, we received a pretty big state refund but had to pay an even bigger federal tax bill. The difference was a little under $1900 that we had to pay to the federal government. So, after we filed last year, we adjusted The Husband’s taxes so that we (hopefully) would not be in the same boat this year.

And it worked… sort of. We are still getting a refund from the state (just smaller) and we still owe the federal government (just less).

After the adjustments to our taxes, we started bringing home around $100 less per month, which kind of sucked (to be honest), but it was better than having to come up with all the money at once. We are very lucky to have some money in savings and not be living totally paycheck to paycheck, but it still hurt to have to dig into our savings.

I can’t remember all the exact numbers this year, but I know that the difference is a little over $1100 that we owe in taxes to the federal government. That’s a decrease of over $700 so I will take it. We have thought about adjusting our taxes even further but because of some possible “life” things coming up, we have decided to leave them as they are for now and we will pay whatever we have to pay next year. (Not because we need the money, but more because we don’t know what the future is going to look like and we feel like paying $1100 isn’t too bad.)

We were hoping we would owe the federal government very little so I’m bummed that we have to take the money out of savings to pay them, but still glad that it’s there. Taking $1100 out of savings puts a wrench in my goals, but we have to pay our taxes so it is what it is.

I’m glad to have our taxes done and filed. We have already mailed the check so we are done with taxes for another year.

WHELP… our stolen car saga is mostly over. Now all that’s left is getting a new vehicle.

Our car was found 11 days after it was stolen. The whole car was trashed, inside and out. It looks like they played bumper cars with our car and I feel badly for all the cars they must have hit!

Last week we received a toll violation from FasTrack because we didn’t pay the toll. We had already called and told FasTrack our car was stolen and deactivated the account for the car, but the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing so we had to go through it all again. We are hoping this time will be the last to deal with FasTrack.

Initially, our car was towed to a body shop to get an estimate for the repairs. The lovely owner of the body shop intimated to us that we should probably start looking for new vehicles. Two days later we were informed that our car was not worth being repaired (which we were glad about, we didn’t really want it back at this point) and that our car was officially going to be totaled. At this point, my husband started trying to figure out the price of similar vehicles so we would have an estimate of what we would get for the car and so that we would know if we were being given a fair payout or not.

Our car was 9 years old with 150,000 miles but still in good working order. There were no mechanical issues and only a few minor cosmetic issues with the car. After doing research, the closest we could find was the same model with only 130,000 miles for $8000. That was the lowest amount we decided we would be happy with.

Fast forward a week or ten days and we were finally given an offer by our insurance… $10,500 plus tax, license, and registration fees of another $1200. They offered us $11,700. We were very happy with that price. 9 years ago we paid $21000 plus tax, license, and registration for the car so we felt this was a good amount. After our deductible, we received $11,200 plus an additional $250 (which they said was the maximum) for personal items. We also pay our insurance yearly so will get $400 back for the “unused portion of the year”.

Additionally, we are filing a case with Hyundai personally. Due to the high theft rates of their vehicles, we are eligible for money for personal items lost (of which there were many and way more than the $250 from insurance) and up tp $375 for our deductible. Hopefully we will get even a little more to put down on our next car.

We are planning to put down (at least) $15,000 on whatever car we do buy and then planning to pay it off early by making extra principal payments.

Once we hear back from Hyundai and get a new vehicle, then our stolen car saga will finally be over! We are 80% of the way done with this drama and I’m ready for it to be over.

This debt update is based on our most recent credit card statement which posted on 3/16/24. I do this mid-month because our credit card closes on the 15th. I can't wait until we are credit card debt free!

As always, we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, but I am happy to say that our debt decreased again; not by much this month, but I’m trying to take my wins where I can get them.

Here is our current credit card debt total:

            $9601.18 at 19.99% interest  

Our total credit card debt stands at: $9601.18 That’s still a lot of debt, but we have seen more progress in the last 19 months than we have seen in the last 8 years. All we can do is just keep plugging away. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the light is getting bigger and brighter every month.

Plus side: Our debt decreased! We have the least amount of credit card debt that we have had in several years! We dropped a digit on our debt! This month our debt is OFFICIALLY below $10,000! That is a major plus! We paid off $399.12 of credit card debt (after interest); that amounts to 4% of our current debt. And we have paid off 61% of our total debt from our high of almost $25,000! The amount of interest we pay monthly has decreased by over $185 per month from its peak!

Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never enough. Of course, interest, interest, interest – that will always be a down side, and we still have a ways to go before we are out of credit card debt!

Looking forward to: having the lowest credit card debt we have had in over 9 years! Continued progress on our debt. I’m excited for March because it has an extra payday for my husband and about half of that is going to go straight to our debt.  There is even a (very slight) chance that we skip the “$8000s” all together and our debt will be in the “$7000s” for my next debt update. Also, my district voted on our raise and now we are waiting for the county office to approve it and then to get our retro checks. Mine should be nearly $5000 and it will almost all go towards our debt! I will also get a small stipend for coaching soccer of about $1700 and that will all go towards our debt, too! There is a possibility that we will be credit card debt free by the end of the school year and I am giddy with hope!

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a lot to look forward to regarding our debt.

I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful, and beyond successful!

I have a new goal for my debt... I'm kind of excited about it!

Now that my debt is a more manageable $10.000 instead of $25,000, (still a lot, but we are making progress!) I want to find money every month to pay an additional 1% of our debt.  

I know that doesn't sound like much, but I believe every little bit helps and any extra money thrown towards our debt will help us to get out of debt faster. Each month the extra money can come from anywhere. If I am able to whittle down our budget we will send the extra money towards our debt. The money could come from extra paychecks or overtime. The whole goal is to send an extra 1% of our debt total towards our debt that wasn't already planned and budgeted for debt.

When our debt was at nearly $25,000, I don't think we could have found an extra $250 to put towards debt. We were making irresponsible choices with our money and didn't have the extra money to spend. Only needing to come up with an extra $100 (at most) is so much more manageable; partly because it's a lower amount but also because we are so much more conscious of what we have coming in and going out.

I literally only thought of this yesterday and my credit card bill is due on the 12th so I don't have a lot of time to come up with extra money this month, so  I will be using the small extra paycheck I will get on the 10th for class coverage to put towards our debt.

Each month we will have to come up with less and less money to find 1% as we decrease our debt, but I still think it will be a fun challenge. I think it will encourage me to take on extra work at school and to be more mindful of our budget monthly.

I'm excited to see what extra money we can come up with and to see if we can come up with more than 1% extra each month. I think I will keep track of the extra money we send towards our debt. When we are debt free, it will be fun to see how much extra money we were able to scrape together and how much this extra little challenge goal affected us. Anything that helps us get out of debt faster is worth it to me! 

Payday was yesterday (for me) and today (for my husband). I feel like we made some good strides this week.

We sent about $650 towards our credit card and stuffed a lot of envelopes this week. We are still dealing with car drama from our car being stolen. (It was found but was in really bad shape. Seats were written on with sharpees, all four sides of the outside had some sort of damage, etc. It was like they played bumber cars with our car!) Due to the car situation, we stuffed $700 into car repair and an additional $300 into our new car fund, with the idea we will be combining those one way or another when the time comes. We also paid our mortgage and added $300 to our savings. 

Sinking fund balances as of 3/1/24:

Christmas: $820

Gas: $965

Food: $300

Clothes: $230

Household: $345

Hair/Nails/Beauty: $400

Kids: $75

School: $110

Car Repair: $1435

Health: $290

Appliances: $260

Home Repair/Furniture: $1275

Car Replacement: $4375

We currently have *$6405 in our sinking funds, not including car replacement. That's pretty good. Our sinking funds saved our butts last month when our water heater went out. I was sad to take the money out of our "appliances" envelope, but so very glad we had it in there! We will also be using money from home repair shortly as the fence between our neighbors yard and ours fell down during the last storm, but again, I'm glad we have the money to pull from.

We will keep plugging away to meet all of our goals: debt reduction and eventual pay off, increased savings, and sinking funds that help keep us on track. 

*I know many people would suggest we use our sinking funds to pay off debt, but life happens. Sinking funds are the way we are preparing for it! Things like the water heater going out, cars getting stolen, and fences getting blown down. All of those things suck and take money to fix. Because of our sining funds, they were inconveniences, not emergencies.

I have been blogging on here since 2020, but I blogged on a google site for a few years before that and I kept a financial journal even longer than that. Recently, I was cleaning up some documents in my financial folder and I found my old e-journal. It was from 2015 and even though I don’t feel like we’ve had any growth in our financial situation, I can now see that we have.

These are some snippets from where we stood about 9 years ago:

We haven’t had enough money for gas or food and to pay our bills and right now our emergency fund is sitting at $6.  Plus, going into the holiday season is very expensive and we are struggling to pay for it.

We currently have no emergency fund and we need to build it back up. Plus, with borrowing the kids’ money, we don’t even have that small cushion to fall back on. I’m very sad I had to borrow their money again, but I am going to work quickly to pay it back.

We have $450 in savings, $300 in our Safeamerica account, and another $400 in cash scattered around our house. (With no money in sinking funds.)

 Right now we are in the “stealing from Peter to pay Paul” cycle and I hate it.

This is what I owe: (2015)

                            Bank of America: $944.70 ($4600 bill paid 2/10/14)

                            VFCU credit card: $7067.10

                            VFCU car loan: $842.59

This is how much we have:

                            Checking: $75.20

                            Savings: $3.83

                            Savings (Jaron): $3.95

                            Savings (Presley): $2.55

Not only did we have credit card debt (less than now, but we are working on it), but we had no money in savings, no cash savings at home, and were borrowing money from our kids’ bank accounts. To see that we only had $3.83 in our savings account is scary, especially because we had no cash on hand to act as a cushion.

Although we are not in a great financial situation today, we are better off than 9 years ago. We have $1500 (and growing) in cash in the bank plus an additional $1400 in a sinking fund savings account. We don’t owe our kids any money. They each have over $7000 in their accounts.  We have around $5500 (one month’s BARE BONES expenses) in cash on hand that we can access at will. We also have an additional $4500 earmarked for a future car purchase, which we will be using sooner rather than later, now. Any way you slice it, we are in a much better position.

We are not out of the woods yet, as far as our finances go, but we do have money in the bank, money in hand, and have steadily been decreasing our credit card debt. More importantly, I am not in a constant state of anxiety about paying our bills or our lack of security. (Admittedly, I am not happy with the low number in out savings, but we are working to increase it this year.)

Lately I’ve been counting my chickens before they’re hatched… which is never a good thing. I’m so sick of this monkey called debt on my back and I’m working out all the scenarios I can to pay it off! We have some money coming in from various places over the next few months and if it all comes in as expected and when expected, we could possibly be credit card debt free by the end of May. But that is only if all the stars align.

Teachers in my district have not been working under a contract for salary since August. Our union reached a tentative agreement last week for a 6.25% raise (retroactive to July 1^st) and 2% one-time monies. With that check I would net between $4500 - $5000 after retirement contributions and taxes.

I am also the soccer coach at my school. When I get paid after the season, I will net $1750, again after retirement contributions and taxes.

March is a three-paycheck month for my husband, one of two every year. We will put a chunk of the extra paycheck into savings and fund our gas and food envelopes like normal. However, retirement and benefits are not taken out of his third paycheck, so we should have an extra $1100 to put towards debt in March.

Lastly, I am selling one of my rings to my daughter’s boyfriend to be used as an engagement ring. (We gave him a good deal, but since the ring is already paid for, it’s all profit for us.) That will be another $1000 to go towards our credit card debt.

The extra monies alone add up to $8350! But, again, as of right now, these are all speculative funds, they haven’t hit our bank account yet.

All of these “extras” are in addition to our normal debt payments which range anywhere from $750 – 1000 a month depending on what expenses we have each month.

I don’t know if everything will pan out as planned but sometimes, it’s good to dream!

This debt update is based on our most recent credit card statement which posted on 2/16/24. I do this mid-month because our credit card closes on the 15th. I can't wait until we are credit card debt free!

As always, we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, but I am happy to say that our debt decreased! It actually went down by more than I was expecting this month because we have had some unexpected expenses pop up!

Here is our current credit card debt total:

            $10,000.30 at 19.99% interest  

Our total credit card debt stands at: $10,000.30 That’s still a lot of debt, but we have seen more progress in the last 18 months than we have seen in the last 8 years. All we can do is just keep plugging away. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the light is getting bigger and brighter every month.

Plus side: Our debt decreased! We have the least amount of credit card debt that we have had in several years! This is the first time our credit card debt has been below $10,000 since before we moved in 2017! (Although it’s not technically, I’m counting it because when our car was stolen, they drove over a bridge and that triggered a $25 charge on our FastTrack. Since the charge wasn’t ours, and will be reimbursed, I am counting it as our debt is below $10,000, because without that charge, we would have been under $10,000!) That is a major plus! We paid off $760.66 of credit card debt (after interest); that amounts to 7% of our current debt! And we have paid off 60% of our total debt from our high of almost $25,000! The amount of interest we pay monthly has decreased by over $150 per month from its peak! I’m super happy that I received an expected paycheck at an unexpected time to push us past the $10,000 threshold!

Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never enough. I’m a little bitter about the stolen car triggering an automatic purchase so we aren’t technically under $10,000, but all I can do is roll with it! Of course, I hate that nearly two hundred dollars went towards interest on our debt instead of towards the principal! We still have a ways to go before we are out of credit card debt!

Looking forward to: continued progress on our debt. I’m excited for March because it has an extra payday for my husband (which won’t actually affect our debt until our April statement, but I’m still excited for it).

I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful, and beyond successful!

One step forward, two steps back! That’s how I feel right now. We are making good progress on out debt. We are budgeting and saving money in our sinking funds. But life keeps throwing us curve balls!

Last night my husband’s car was stolen. My son had to drive over an hour to work so they traded cars that day. It was stolen off the street in broad daylight. There is video surveillance of it being stolen, but all we could do was file a police report. (It could have been worse. I’m so glad it’s just a stolen car and wasn’t a carjacking or worse! And I’m so thankful that my son is safe!)

It was our “reliable” car and our car that got the best gas mileage. It was a 2015 Hyundai Sonata. We have two remaining vehicles, a 1990 Chevy Silverado and a 2001 Ford Ranger. (Full disclosure, my mom lives with us and graciously allows us to use her 2017 Subaru Forrester which is also very reliable and gets good gas mileage but isn’t OURS.)

Luckily, we have full coverage on that vehicle so we will call insurance and go from there. We should get around $7000 from insurance. We have started a new car fund, but we haven’t saved as much as we would like because we are having to buy a new vehicle earlier than expected.

We will have $12,000 to work with. We haven’t decided if we will buy the best car we can for $12,000 or buy new and have a car payment. (I know the math and I’m not asking for suggestions, just sharing where we are.)

We tend to prefer new cars but then we drive them until they die (or get stolen in this case). We have purchased 4 new cars in our 23 years together: 2001 Honda Civic (drove for 9 years when it was totaled in a hit and run accident), 2003 Santa Fe (daily driver for 12 years (7 with me, 5 with my husband) and kept as our “Home Depot” car for another 4 years), 2010 Chevy Traverse (driven for 12 years and 230,000 miles until the repairs started to become too frequent and costly), and our 2015 Hyundai Sonata (driven for 9 years and 170,000 until it was stolen).

Last night and today have been rough, but I am a glass half-full person so I am looking at the bright side. Everybody is safe, no one was hurt, and my husband’s work is very understanding and working remotely indefinitely won’t be a problem.

It just sucks but it could always be worse. Whine over.

I AM SO EXCITED!!! I got an expected paycheck at a very UNexpected time.

I was the assistant flag football coach at my school this year. It is a paid position (that I did NOT want, but 3 different people asked me to take the job… long story involving lots of work drama!). I knew I was going to be paid as a coach, but I thought the check would come in summer. I was, and still am, the head soccer coach at my school and I was paid in July last year. Anyway, unexpectedly, this paycheck came on 2/9.

After taxes, I received just over $900. I put one third, $300 into savings and the remaining $600+ went towards our credit card debt.

Our credit card cycle closes on the 14^th and I think and am hoping, this extra payment will push me past the $10,000 threshold. It has been so hard to get below $10,000 and we are so close.  

I was tempted to put the entire amount towards our debt, but I am happier splitting it up and adding some towards our savings. Security is a big deal to me, and I am trying to grow our savings while at the same time paying down debt. We have two main goals right now: decrease debt and increase savings. Splitting this extra paycheck helps us to address both of them.

I’m so thankful this extra paycheck came when it did! I will know in a couple of days if it was enough to bring us below $10,000 in credit card debt! But even if it isn't, it's another step in the right direction!

Wish us luck!

With everything, I find the more organized I am, the less stressed I am. My finances are no exception. So, I decided to make a “financial binder”. The nerdy, Type A person in me is LOVING it! In general, I am pretty organized. I’ve talked about the fact that even though we are in debt, we have never missed or been late on a bill. I’m a credit card company’s dream customer. I always pay (at least) the minimum payment and I always pay it on time.

I created a binder to keep everything together and in order. I scoured Pinterest to find different budget forms I would need then I created them to my own preferences. By making it myself, as opposed to buying someone else’s premade Budget Binder, I was able to use only the forms I wanted and make them in a way that would be most beneficial to me! I picked fonts I liked. I set the forms up the way I liked. It’s all mine… and I love it!

I decided on 5 different dividers for my financial binder: Budgeting, Debt, Savings, Goal Setting, and Planning. I used a regular 2 inch binder and colorful dividers. Many of the pages are in plastic sleeves, but the pages that are accessed and written on regularly are just hole-punched and put in the binder. In the front of the binder, I have a pencil pouch that holds pens, pencils, highlighters, and post-it notes.

My “Budgeting” divider holds:

a list of our monthly recurring expenses with a check-off sheet for each month

a budget categories list that lists everything we budget for in a month

blank calendars for each month of the year to be used as bill payment calendars

completed monthly budget sheets for each month of the year (I only print out 3 months at a time to leave a little room for change. However, our wages are very predictable.)

My “Debt” divider holds:

a debt worksheet where all my debts (including my mortgage) are listed

debt payoff charts where I fill in squares with the amount of debt paid off each month (each one is $2000 of debt erased!)

My “Savings” divider holds:

sinking fund trackers for each of my sinking funds

savings charts (I currently have two savings goals)

increase our emergency fund savings to $3000

repay $2000 to a savings account we have set aside for possibly moving

no spend challenge calendars to track how many no spend days I have a month

My “Goal Setting” divider holds:

a monthly goal check-in where I put my goals for the month (be they personal or financial) and can track my progress

an immediate goal (to be accomplished in 30 days or less)

a short-term goal (to be accomplished in 3-6 months)

a long-term goal (to be accomplished in 1-2 years)

My “Planning” divider holds:

bank account information

credit card information

a charitable donations tracker

a Christmas list

It’s such a little thing, but it actually makes me excited to pay bills and track my spending and saving. It’s fun coloring in the squares on my savings chart and my debt pay-off tracker. And anything that makes paying bills fun is a win in my book!

I need a new cell phone. My phone is an Apple 10. I am trying so hard to limp my cell phone along until we can get out of credit card debt. Some days, my phone works fine and there are no issues. Other days, it freezes for minutes at a time and no matter how many times I click on an app, nothing happens.

I don’t upgrade my phones very often. I try to use them until they die. The phone before my 10 was an iphone 4. I don’t’ want to use my (already small) emergency fund for a phone. I also don’t want to slow our debt payoff to fund a phone. Lastly, I DON’T want to go into more debt by trading in my phone and then adding the payment to my phone bill for two years.

When my phone is working well, I think “I might be able to sneak by with this phone for another 12-18 months. But when my phone is glitching, I think I can’t get by with another 12-18 minutes! In all honestly, my phone works way more often than it doesn’t, but it does glitch a couple of times a week. The glitches are usually less than 5 minutes long, but they are still so frustrating!

Lately, however, I haven’t been getting text or call notifications. My phone doesn’t go off. I see the notification on the screen afterwards, but I am missing texts and calls. This is proving to be more problematic than an app not opening.

In my opinion, phones are so expensive. I don’t understand people who upgrade every time a new phone is released. My brother-in-law does that. EVERY TIME.  He upgrades for himself and his two teenaged children. I just don’t understand it. It is so expensive to get a new phone, plus you have to learn all the new nuances and work out all the kinks. The hassle and cost just aren’t worth it to me.

I am so hoping I can make this phone work for another year or so. Once our credit card debt is paid off, we will be able to buy me a new phone outright within a month or two. Then we will be able to get serious about saving. But… one step at a time. First we just need to keep plugging away at our debt!

Well… Murphy came to visit this weekend. Luckily, we were mostly prepared for him.

We are hosting a foreign exchange student from Belgium for the semester and on Saturday we planned to be tourists for the day in San Francisco. Before we left, my husband went out to the fridge in the garage to grab something and found water all over the ground. Apparently, our hot water heater was leaking. We actually think we caught it pretty early, which is a blessing!

My husband attached a hose to it to drain it and called my brother, who owns a plumbing company, to ask some questions. He then had us call my nephew (who works for him) to order a new water heater. The upshot of it is, it’s being delivered and installed today, and it didn’t ruin our plans to go to SF.  We are also very lucky to have generous neighbors who we are close to who allowed us to shower in their house. We were like a parade going in and out on both Saturday and Sunday nights.

We could have gotten a water heater yesterday from Home Depot and been in business one day sooner, but we decided the cost savings was worth it to wait one more day… in both time and money. We will get the water heater at cost and my nephew, who is a plumber, will install it for us. My husband will help, but the learning curve will not be there because he isn’t doing it himself. (My husband is very handy and takes on a lot of home repairs. But sometimes, we choose to leave things to the professionals. Especially when they are our brothers and nephews!)

As you all know, we are in credit card debt, but about 6 months ago we started some new sinking funds, two of which were appliances and home repair so, coming up with the money won’t be an issue because it’s already there. I will be sad to part with it but am SO happy we have it. What could have been a major setback (especially to our hearts and minds) just became a relatively minor inconvenience.

We were able to play tourists for the day and not stress too much about our water heater issue. We had a jam-packed day in San Francisco. We visited and walked over the Golden Gate Bridge, drive down Lombard Street, climbed to the top of Coit Tower (the only touristy thing I had not done before, I’d been there but never to the top), ate clam chowder on Pier 39, played games at the Musee Mecanique, walked around Fisherman’s Wharf, and ended with dinner in North Beach, which was a special request from our student who loves Italian food! It started out rough but ended up being a great day!

We don’t know the final cost yet of our water heater, but we will pay it and keep plugging away, at both our debt and replenishing our sinking funds!

Just a quick thank you post to all the kind people who have commented on my posts. I read and appreciate all the comments and suggestions you guys are giving me and am even trying to put some of them into practice.

I have so enjoyed being a (mostly quiet) part of this community. I blog for my own accountability and rarely comment on other blogs, (but I'm working on it). But I love to read the comments on everyone's blogs. This is such a smart, creative group of people and I appreciate how willing everyone is to share their knowledge and ideas!

Thank you all!

It has literally taken me 25 years to dig out of the hole I started digging when I was 18, and I'm not done yet. At its peak, our credit card debt was $24,904.68. We are down to $10,760.96, progress, sure, but not credit card debt free. 

We have had periods in our life over the last 25 years where we were credit card debt free, but inevitably, we would rack the credit card debt back up. 20 months ago, we hit our all-time high in credit card debt and are finally seeing the light and making real changes. We are adequately funding our sinking funds, planning for upcoming expenses, and cash-flowing everything we can to avoid going backwards with our progress. We even have a baby emergency fund for real unexpected expenses.  Our progress has been slower than we would like, but it's still progress. 

We have both short- and long-term savings goals within our envelope system. Long term we are saving for: new (to us) cars, home repair/furniture, and appliances. More immediate savings goals are for: car repairs/tires, car registration, annual car insurance, home essentials, health essentials, clothing, school costs, and Christmas. Funding all these different sinking funds “slows down” our progress, but they are the reason we have progress. Without these sinking funds, we would have to charge every expense that pops up.

We also contribute to our retirement. As a teacher, nearly 11% of my income is taken out of my paycheck and put into CALSTRS, before I even see it. I also contribute an additional 15% to my 403b. My husband contributes 13% of his paycheck to his 401k and gets a 3% match from his employer. On top of that, on his first paycheck of every year, his company gives another 6% into his 401k they call profit sharing. All told, we contribute about 23% of our pre-tax income to retirement every year. (I know we could be out of debt faster without doing that. I know the math supports pausing retirement to pay off high income debt. But I also know that our peace of mind is worth the extra time/money in debt. We watch my husband’s parents struggle in their retirement because they didn’t plan well and never want to be in that situation.)

We are also trying to be strategic with any unexpected monies that fall into our lap.  Right now we only have a baby emergency fund and want to grow that so we put a small amount (based on how much “extra” money we get) into savings, a very small amount of unexpected monies gets dedicated to the buffer in our checking account and the rest goes towards our credit card debt.

I wish it didn't take us 25 years to learn these lessons but at least we have learned them. Our kids have seen us struggle and hopefully won't make our mistakes. They both (by their own choices) use the envelope system. They both save 20% of their income. They both tithe 10% of their income. Our 20-year-old has started his Roth IRA and our 18-year-old has earmarked $1500 in her savings to start her Roth IRA.

Our kids are so far ahead of where we were at the same age and my only consolation is that I think part of the reason for that is the struggles we have had. Hopefully they will never struggle the same way and will live within their means, which was our biggest mistake.

All these choices and how we handle our money are a result of our credit card debt and how we have treated credit cards since we were 18. We don’t blame the credit cards and we don’t blame the credit card companies. We blame ourselves. I CANNOT wait for the day that we owe nothing to our credit card! The way we use and allocate our money will change drastically. Right now, we have to use our money in the present to pay for purchases from the past, and it will be so freeing to have more choices.

44-year-old self, you are growing up. You are handling your finances and credit cards more responsibly. And you are going to get out of debt. All the hard work has taught you so much and will help you in the second half of your life. The mistakes in your past don’t have to be the mistakes in your future. But, remember, it's okay to stumble. You don't, and won't, get everything right. The important thing is to persevere! Keep going!

44-year-old self, you are making progress, but it’s also okay to need a pity party once in a while.

Today, I’m pulling myself up by my bootstraps and getting back to it. I will get break the $10,000 threshold. I will stay the course, and I will get out of debt. I have to remember that this debt is 25 years in the making. It didn’t happen overnight so it’s not going to go away overnight… but it is going to go away!

Let me start by saying, credit cards aren’t inherently bad. Actually, when you manage them correctly, they are good. I, however, have not been a good manager. In fact, I’ve handled them poorly for more years than I have handled them well.

Dear 18-Year-Old Self,

Don’t sign up for credit cards yet. You don’t have enough experience with finances: paychecks, bills, reconciling bank accounts, etc, to make informed decisions with credit.

Among other things, you don’t make enough money to warrant needing credit cards. You work at a retail store making just over minimum wage and you live at home. You don’t need credit. If you can’t afford to pay cash for it, you can’t afford it and you don’t need it.

Let me reiterate, credit and credit cards are not intrinsically bad, but the way you will handle them at 18 is. For the first month of two, you will be so responsible and pay-off everything you charge. But as the months go on, you charge more and can afford to pay less, and before you know it, your card will be maxed out and you will be making minimum payments.

As a young and naïve adult, you will think that because you can afford the minimum payments, you can afford whatever it is you are buying. That’s just plain wrong!

Think about it this way: do you want to be paying for that sweater you are wearing now, at 18, when you are 25 years old and don’t even have anymore? That is how credit works. In your present, you are paying for your past, with no end in sight. It truly is a viscous cycle.

You are not responsible enough for a credit card and it will take you literally 25 years to dig yourself out of the hole you started digging at 18. You need more experience managing the money you do have before you start trying to use money you don’t have.

You will get there but give yourself a better foundation first. Try the envelope system, try only using your bank card, write checks, but don’t sign-up for credit cards yet. I promise, your future self will thank you.

Response from my 44 year old self coming next week.

I’m starting to get “debt-pay-off-fatigue”. (I don’t know if it’s a real thing, but it sure feels like it!) We have been slogging away for 20 months and it’s still not gone! (We know it’s our own fault and that we did it to ourselves. We take full responsibility but are just sick of it!) We have paid off 57% of our total debt and are hoping to pay it off this year, but we are tired.

When we first got deep into credit card debt, we worked hard at payoff. We got “down” to around $19,000 - 20,000 very quickly. And then we hovered around there for months… like 10 months! For one reason or another, we weren’t making much progress. Some months we only paid off $100 and some months we put $200 back on. It was infuriating! Then, we finally broke that threshold, and we were so happy. Progress was fast and furious for several months… and now it’s almost non-existent.

Christmas and the holiday season are always expensive, but they massively slowed down our progress! Our last three credit card statements have shown almost no progress. ☹

Right now, I’m really feeling debt-fatigue. We are so close to breaking the $10,000 threshold, but we still feel so far away! Even though we “only” have $10,700 in credit card debt, I don’t think we will be able to break $10,000 by our next statement. Due to some upcoming expenses, we only assigned $774 to go towards our debt, but then we need to add interest.

We hovered at the $19,000-20.000 threshold for months and now I feel like we are doing the same thing at $10,000. We just can’t break it.

I know we will… I know we are close… I know we will get out of debt. I’m just having a pity party today.

I know this is a weird topic to write about on a financial blog, but I have found for myself that I start to spend more when I am not taking care of myself. These are some of the ways I recharge my own battery without spending too much money.

Renewing yourself and self care are super important in this fast-paced crazy world we live in. But when you are on a budget, it can sometimes be difficult to find ways to do so frugally. In a lot of ways, I’m really lucky that I am in introvert and recharge my battery best when I have some “alone” time. Most ways I recharge my mental batteries are pretty cheap.

The best thing I can do for myself and my mental health is to take a long, hot bath with a good book. I love to take baths and I love to read, combining the two is heaven… and it’s free. However, even with adult children, sometimes it’s hard to find the time to take a long bath, but I try at least once a week. I like the time by myself without a care in the world.

Just spending time reading helps me to recharge. Although not always free, it’s definitely a pretty frugal way to spend my time. I love to read almost anything. I read both fiction and non-fiction alike and enjoy them equally. When I am really low, I will almost always choose fiction because I don’t have to think about it. It gives me time out of my own head where I don’t have to worry about my problems.

I love tea. Just sitting and enjoying a great cup of tea in a beautiful bone china tea cup and saucer feels incredibly decadent to me and mentally fills my bucket, for a nominal cost. I have dozens of tea cups and saucers to choose from as well as many flavors of tea. Tea time becomes a well deserved break from every day.

Another way I recharge my batteries and tend to my mental (and physical) health is through exercise. I walk and weight train and both improve my physical and mental well-being for free. I’m not an outdoorsy person, but I love hiking, not because of the nature but because of the physical challenge it gives me. I strength train 4 days a week and I have noticed that when I work out consistently, in general I sleep better and feel better.

I love a myself a good pedicure. It is probably the most expensive thing I do for my mental health, although it’s not terribly expensive. Prior to committing to get out of debt, I got pedicures at least monthly, now I only get two or three a year so they are extra special and feel extra indulgent.  I do have a hair and nails envelope but feel guilty getting pedicures while I still have debt so I don’t get them often, but once our credit card debt is paid off, I think I will revert back to monthly pedicures. I love them. They are time to relax, be by myself, and read a good book.

The last thing I do to renew myself could become expensive if I let it. I love to go to Barnes and Noble, look at books, and sit down to peruse them with a chai tea latte. Unless I have a gift card, I usually only allow myself to buy one book. We don’t have a Barnes and Noble where I live so I don’t do this often, but just like a pedicure, it feels so indulgent.

PS Today I was on an interview panel for work and had to meet my principal at the District Office about an hour later than my usual work time. I chose to wake up, do a longer-than-normal-workout-on-a-weekday and take an hour long bath. It was glorious and just what I needed!

I know I’m a little late with my goals, but life has been hectic.

Last year I only had two goals, to decrease debt and increase our savings. We were only successful with one of those. We decreased our debt by almost 50% last year. But our savings decreased as well. On the plus side, however, we didn’t increase our debt and cash flowed nearly $20,000 of expenses in that year.

Our goals are pretty basic. I have the same goals for 2024 that I had last year as well as one additional goal. I want to decrease debt (with the outside goal of eliminating our credit card debt), increase our savings to $5000 (from $1500), and move across the country without accruing more debt.

Goal 1: We owe right around $10,700 on our credit card. We didn’t quite make our goal of $10,500 by 12/31 but I’m not trying to dwell on it. We will definitely decrease out debt, but I’m hoping we can actually get rid of this credit card debt once and for all. I think becoming consumer debt free is a stretch goal this year, but I don’t think it’s impossible. To stay accountable, I also want to write debt updates every month. Some months will be better than others, but I think consistency and accountability will help our overall progress.

Goal 2: Increase our savings from $1500 to $5000. Our savings took a hit this year. 2023 was an expensive year for us between travel and helping our kids launch into adult hood. This year should be better so we shouldn’t need to dip into our savings as much and in fact should be able to build it up some. With each of The Husband’s 3 paycheck months, we will dump an extra $500 into savings which should help us meet our goal.

Goal 3: We have a potential (but likely) move across the country coming. We know it will be expensive so we have been planning for it. We are hoping to be able to cash flow the whole move and what we will need to buy when we get there. We plan on leaving a lot of our furniture, as it is very old and worn down. We have a “furniture” sinking fund that we have been putting money into, as well as a sinking funds for appliances and home repair. We are hoping this will be enough savings to move without accruing any more debt.

That’s it. Those are our goals for 2024. All doable, but all needing planning and perseverance. I'm hoping 2024 is the year we finally get out of credit card debt!

What are your goals for the year?

Christmas is expensive for everyone… so it always is my goal is to give a useful gift that doesn’t cost a lot of money.

This year, I made 5 different soaps for all the women/girls in my life. I made a Lemon-Poppyseed exfoliating soap, a shave soap, Rose soap, Mango-Papaya soap, and a Milk and Honey Soap. I gave 27 gifts of soap, 5 bars each. The total I had to purchase for each gift came out to $10.82 per gift. I have been making soap for a couple years, so I didn’t need to buy much in the way of equipment. (I did buy a new stick blender for soap use only and chose not to factor that into my per gift cost.) In addition to 27 gifts, I have several extra bars of soap left over. In total, I probably have about 20 “extra” bars of soap. My daughter and I will use them and I can still gift them as necessary.

For the men in my life (men only, younger boys got something off of their list), I made homemade, food safe wood butter. I also included a wooden spoon and microfiber buffing cloth. The total for each gift came to $7.16 and I made enough to give out 30 gifts plus have 3 left over.. The wood butter is made out of walnut oil and food safe beeswax. I needed to purchase 3 gallons of walnut oil, the mason jars, wooden spoons, and microfiber cloths. I already had enough beeswax from a project a couple years ago. (Clearly I bought too much then, however, I did factor in some of the cost of the beeswax when figuring out my per item cost.

I’m very pleased with my per gift price. I’m also very happy that the are useful, consumable gifts. I know we don’t need any more “stuff” in our lives and I imagine a lot of people feel the same way, so I have been trying to give gifts that are very useful and/or can be used up.

I’m already thinking of and looking for ideas for next year’s Christmas gift. Any ideas?

Obviously, the first thing on this list is Christmas… although it comes around every year, it doesn’t come around every month. We have been planning for Christmas all year. We have been putting aside money each month so that when Christmas rolls around, we won’t go farther into debt to pay for it. So far, so good. We won’t pay down our debt by much this month, but we won’t add to it either, and that is a win in my book. In previous years, we have added to our debt by as much as $2500 during the months of November and December. The goal this year is to not increase our debt. Anything we payoff in the next 4 weeks is a plus!

Along with Christmas in general, we have a huge Christmas party every year. It’s an open house and we invite about 100 – 115 people. We usually see about 75 people on this day. We have already bought a lot of the food but still have some stuff to buy. This should be covered by our grocery budget. We give a favor every year and this year I decided to make candied nuts. We have jars that I bought at Winco about 6 years ago that I am finally going to use. Because we already have the jars, the favors will probably cost us about $1.50 each. We give out 1 per family, so I will make 30-35 jars worth. The “leftovers” I give to people at work.

I haven’t actually written about this here, but I think I’ve alluded to it. I am taking an 11 day trip to England with my mom. We leave mid-December and return right before Christmas so we will be home for the holiday. My mom is 82 and has always wanted to be in London at Christmas time. (She has been to London several times, but never in winter.) My school schedule lined up with us going this year and it is one of her “bucket list” items so we are going. I have already paid my airfare. We got a pretty good deal at $867 roundtrip. Our hotel will be charged right before we leave and I have been saving for that and will have the full amount when we leave. I will just need to pay for food and any spending money. I have saved and set aside $600 for this. I don’t know if that will be enough, but it’s a good starting point at least.

This is all I can think of for our unusual spending for December… and it’s going to be expensive! The goal is to cash flow and not add to our debt!

Our finances are always in a better place when we pay attention to them, which makes perfect sense. What doesn’t make perfect sense is that we aren’t always on top of our finances. Anyway, the one downside I always feel when we are paying strict attention to our finances is the whole “payday high to next day low”.

Every payday that comes around brings with it this high of financial success. Paying bills, paying down debt, cash stuffing envelopes, tallying totals. I love all of it! But, then the next day, there is nothing going on with our finances for a week or two, and I feel this incredible low. That low is the part of our finances that makes it hard to stay the course.

I know we are making great strides financially. We are paying down debt at a pretty good rate. We are slowly building our savings back up to (what we consider) an acceptable amount. We are adequately funding our sinking funds, we contribute 20% to our retirement, and we are making plans for our future, but after payday I’m always so sad that there is nothing I can do to better our financial situation until the next payday.

It's so hard to only feel like you are making progress a few days a month. I know that in reality, every step we take towards financial freedom is a step in the right direction, I just wish the feeling could last longer than payday.

I check my credit card and bank account balances almost daily and most days I don’t see any movement, but when I do, it’s truly the best feeling. For that moment, I feel like I will get out of debt and that I’m making great progress. Inevitably, the feeling fades and I have to wait until payday to feel it again. I can’t be the only person who feels like this, right?

Staying the course is the hardest part of debt payoff… but I am in it for the long haul, and we are making progress… even on the days it doesn’t feel like it!

This debt update is based on our most recent credit card statement which posted on 11/16/23. I do these mid-month because our credit card closes on teh 15th. I can't wait until we are credit card debt free!

As always, we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, but I am happy to say that our debt decreased! It actually went down by a pretty good chunk, and by more than I was expecting this month!

Here is our current credit card debt totals:

            $10,761.64 at 19.99% interest  

Our total credit card debt stands at: $10,761.64 That’s still a lot of debt, but we have seen more progress in the last 15 months than we have seen in the last 8 years. All we can do is just keep plugging away. We dug our hole one shopping trip at a time and all we can do is pay it back one month at a time. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and the light is getting bigger and brighter every month.

Plus side: Our debt decreased! We have the least amount of credit card debt that we have had in several years! This is the first time our credit card debt has been below $11,000 since before we moved in 2017! That is a major plus! We paid off $1145.85 of credit card debt (after interest); that amounted to 9.6% of our current debt! And we have paid off 57% of our total debt from our high of almost $25,000! The amount of interest we pay monthly has decreased by over $127 per month!

Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never enough. Of course, I hate that a couple hundred dollars went towards interest on our debt instead of towards the principal! We are heading into the holiday season and we always increase our debt, so I am afraid of that. I understand our progress will be slowed, but I am hoping and praying for discipline and the continued decrease of our debt!

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $10,500 by our next statement and keeping it that way. It’s looking like we will actually meet our short-term goal of being under $10,500 in credit card debt by the end of the year! I’m also excited to make a new short-term goal! There is a slight chance that we might be under $10,000 on our next statement. It’s going to be close and I’m going to keep chugging along and doing the best I can! And whether or not that happens on our next statement, I’m super excited to drop a number on our debt in the near future!

I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful, and beyond successful!