I’m still not quite ready to share our debt total, but I am ready to talk about it.

We only have one credit card. (For pretty obvious reasons as we aren’t responsible with credit.) For the first time in our adult lives, however, we have exceeded our credit limit. And we have a very high credit limit!

Our April statement was $1105.68 over our credit limit. Sad to say, I think it might just have been the kick in the pants we needed. We are not proud of it, but it shocked us in a way nothing else has! By our May statement, we were still $465.13 over our limit. Still over, but after interest, we paid off $640.55. We have continued to make progress. With the payments we have already made this month, we are below our credit limit. We aren’t below it by much, but we are making progress. Currently, we are $124.88 under our credit limit.

Throughout this billing cycle, we have 3 more opportunities to put money towards our debt. We have budgeted another $1784 to go towards our debt by the time this cycle ends. (May is a very expensive month for us! We have 2 birthdays, an anniversary, a high school graduation, and an out-of-town wedding.)

I’m just happy we are back under our credit limit. And hoping that we will continue to make decent progress each month.

The Husband’s payday is today, and he had a couple of unexpected hours of overtime on his check! I also received a paycheck from my childcare work at my church to the tune of $50.

In our original budget, we were only able to send $140 of this paycheck towards our credit card debt, but with the overtime we were able to send $400 plus my little paycheck of $50, for a total of $450 towards our debt!

I know it is not much, but every little bit helps! And if we were able to send an extra $310 every month, we would pay our debt off a full 3 months sooner. I don’t know how often we will be able to find an extra $300+ in our budget to put towards our credit card, but I am going to celebrate EVERY small win we have! We need all the motivation we can get as this is going to be a long haul!

Our debt is ENOURMOUS! We currently have the highest credit card debt we have EVER had! I’m too insecure to share the amount right now, but I am working up the courage to do so. Having said that, we think we will be able to send between $1100 - $1500 per month towards our credit card. (Varying amounts depending on what other expenses we have each month).

Our billing cycle runs “funny”. We are thinking about asking them to change our closing date and billing cycle but want to pay some down before we do that.

During our last billing cycle, we sent $1270 to our credit card debt. Not too bad, and more than we usually send. If we have to charge on the account for any reason, that is factored into our budget, so this $1270 is what went towards our debt. (Of course, not all of it because we have to pay stupid tax…. Interest.)

During our next billing cycle, we have $1924 earmarked to go towards our debt. I am super happy with this number! This is not a normal month and I’m hoping we are able to meet it! Two things in particular helped bump this month up. First, we have a pause on our daughter’s dance tuition so I’m anticipating not having to pay tuition this month. Secondly, I should receive my “extra pay” paycheck and it should have 2 months of extra pay. I’m anticipating about $400 of extra take home pay.

If we can send north of $1400 per month, I feel like we will start to see some progress. I know it will be slow at first and a lot of that money will get eaten up by interest, especially at the beginning, but we will start to see results.

Because we are irresponsible with credit cards, we have switched to mainly using our debit cards when needed, which as we all know is money we actually have!  We really like to use cash envelopes but fell off the wagon with Covid and banks being closed. We are trying to get back to cash. Last week I went to the bank with my withdrawal slip and my post-it note with my denominations breakdown and the teller actually asked me what I was doing? (She was nice about it, just curious why I wanted so many $20’s, $10’s, and $5’s.)

I always try to remind myself; we didn’t dig our hole in a day, we won’t fill it in a day. We are trying to make small changes that will add up to big rewards later.

As I talked about in my last post, the last several weeks were expensive! Now we are in recovery mode.

In the last three weeks, we went through a good chunk of our emergency fund, just upwards of $3000. Now, we are only $400 away from filling it back up. Once our emergency fund is back up to our comfort level, I will stop putting money in savings and send everything to our credit card debt.

We have been very lucky to be able to refill our EF so quickly! First, April was a three paycheck month for The Husband. Originally the bulk of that extra paycheck was slated to go towards debt, but we diverted the extra money to help refill our EF.

Second, we also had some regularly schedule deposits that totaled over $1000. (Going forward, those will all go towards our credit card debt unless we need to top off our EF due to use.) It’s super important to us to have a healthy savings account. We really believe in the Dave Ramsey method, but with all our responsibilities, we don’t think $1000 is enough, so we always want more in savings.

I also make small amounts helping with childcare at my work. I received a $100 check that went right into savings. (Once our EF is funded to our satisfaction, that extra money will become my “fun” money, but it is more important to me to have a funded EF.)

Lastly, The Daughter injured herself dancing so she is not currently practicing and hasn’t been for a few weeks. Due to that, the director of her studio paused her tuition. It was a total shock to us and we didn’t know it was happening. That was another $400 we were able to put back into our emergency fund.

I don’t anticipate much extra money coming in during the month, so I don’t think we will reach our EF goal until the end of May. Then, we will start aggressively sending money towards our debt.