October 21st, 2020 at 04:32 pm
Thank you all so much for the warm welcome! I read all your comments, thoughts, and suggestions! They were very appreciated!
I actually wrote this last week and tried posting it several times, but with all the issues the site was having, it got lost somewhere in the interwebs.
After reading some of the comments I was a little concerned that I painted too dire a picture of our financial situation.
Although I HATE our debt, I want to be clear that we are not struggling or living totally paycheck to paycheck (although we have in the past).
We do have savings. In the bank we have 3 months of bare bones expenses: mortgage, utilities, gas, and food. I know conventional wisdom says we should take that money and pay off our credit card debt, but it brings us peace of mind during this crazy time.
The Husband and I have both been very lucky during this pandemic and we have been working the whole time. However, we know that things could change very quickly in this economic climate. My job is pretty secure. I am a public school teacher, but The Husband works in the private sector and we want to be as prepared as possible for any sort of job loss. That is part of the reason we are trying to get rid of our credit card debt so badly. To clarify, we do not anticipate anything happening to his job, (in fact he was asked to work overtime this weekend) but we want as many of our ducks in a row as possible, just in case.
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October 8th, 2020 at 06:44 pm
We have a lot of debt. We have a mortgage, a 401K loan, a solar loan, and one ginormous credit card.
The credit card is the one that stresses me out the most and keeps me up at night. We have been credit card debt free only two times in our adult life and both times we paid off our debt with an unexpected windfall and both times we vowed never to go back into credit card debt. Yet, here we are.
We took out a 401K loan to help us buy a house about 3 1/2 years ago. It is a 5 year loan and we have about 18 months left to pay on it. It is automatically deducted every paycheck.
After having $725 utility bills in our new (to us) home, we decided to get solar. We took out a 10 year loan and are 2 years in, so 8 to go, before that is paid off. That is also on auto pay, but we are hoping to pay if off a little early.
We don't currently have any auto loans, but I don't know how long that is going to last. My car is almost 11 years old with 160,000 and The Husband's car is almost 6 years old with 93,000. Added to that we added a driver this year and plan to add another one next year.
Our most stressful debt to me is our credit card. We have $13,000 in credit card debt. This is actually an improvement. In January we owed $21,000 so we are making progress. Our goal was to have less than $10,000 in credit card debt by the end of this year. I don't know if we are going to make it, but we have made decent progress. This time getting out of debt we have actually been digging our way out one month and payment at a time. In the past, we used "windfalls" to get out of debt. I'm hoping it sticks this time because we are actually putting in the work.
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October 8th, 2020 at 05:13 pm
I have been reading blogs here for several years and finally decided to start my own!
I don't know that I have a particularly interesting story or much to say, but I think this would be a great place to keep a financial journal just for me.
Where to start... I am married to the man of my dreams, my high school sweetheart, and we have been together for over 25 years. We have two teenaged children that are pretty awesome. We live in California where the cost of living is ridiculous! Most anywhere else we would be living "high on the hog", but here we are solidly upper middle class.
Neither one of us ever developed very good personal finance skills, so we have made mistake after mistake and are trying to clean up our mess now.
Besides our astronomical mortgage, we have a 401K loan, a solar loan, and one credit card with a very high balance!
We own both of our cars, but they are getting up there in age and we added one driver this past summer and will be adding another one in the next year.
We are trying to escape the debt cycle we have been in for over 20 years.
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