Roughly one year ago I posted about how we were going to get out of debt and stay out of debt. Some may ask where we are at in the process. The first few months were a dream. My wife and I had various liquid accounts that were sitting around idle. I was able to pay off nearly $7000 in credit card debt very quickly by just restructuring my accounts and following the Dave Ramsey baby steps. The remaining 9 months have been slow and mentally painful. After the first few big payments and closing a few accounts, my brain told me that this was going to be a cake walk, that without even trying I had eliminated two of the plastic cards that were causing some of my financial stress. After the liquid accounts ran dry and all we had left was our $1000 starter emergency fund, paying off debt slowed to a crawl.
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Since the beginning of time, man has been in debt. I have been telling myself that I will get out of debt as soon as possible, but I never follow through. I mean, I work on paying off debt but as soon as I find something that I want and don’t have cash for, I will run out and do a balance transfer with a good rate or use a credit card and try to pay it off. This issue has been revolving for me, I found a motorcycle in 2003 for $3000. I couldn’t turn that deal away since the bike was worth about $6500. I did a balance transfer and paid with “cash”, then made payments on it for what seemed like forever. I finally paid that off around 2 years ago. Then my mom decided she wanted to move to a different state. That is no big deal except that the housing market was in the trash and she wasn’t going to be able to pay off the entire mortgage. In addition to that, the buyer was pushing her around since it was a buyers market. At the end of the deal, she needed a little bit of cash. I owed her some money so I took out $2000 from a credit card on a zero percent rate. While I was paying that down, I found a new deal on a motorcycle that I could not pass up. This time the bike cost $6500, but that is no big deal, cause I have a credit card with a good rate! WRONG AGAIN. However, I purchased the bike and used the proceeds from selling the old bike to help pay some of that debt down.
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