“Life After Credit Card Debt” Archive

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Life After Credit Card Debt – September Update

Tricia here with a quick monthly update. Like Beks, I have been sick for the past couple of days. Thankfully, it doesn’t appear to be the flu. It seems like the cold I get when the seasons change.

This month was supposed to be a better month. It was a better month for our discretionary spending since we started a cash based system. It’s our necessary spending for health (supplements, specific healthier foods, etc.) that really hurt. I don’t regret spending the money, but it is really hurting our bottom line.

There’s also the wonderful surprise we received on September 2 from our health insurance company. They decided to raise our rates 28%. Oh, and the first payment with the new rate was due today. That’s an extra $115/month we have to now pay – and we didn’t even get a 30 day notice. If we didn’t need their health insurance, I would have cancelled it right then and there. I understand that rates sometimes need to be increased. We’ve dealt with many companies that have raised rates recently. But giving less than a 30 day’s notice is dirty in my book. We are fortunate – we had a little bit of wiggle room to be able to cover it this month. I know that there are many families that didn’t.

With everything going on, I am still very grateful. We are still credit card debt free and we are still holding our head above water. We’ll keep plugging away with increasing our emergency savings and paying off the rest of our debt, even if sometimes it feels like we are spinning our wheels. Eventually we’ll get some traction

Posted by Tricia on September 25, 2009 at 10:43 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 11 Comments »
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Life After Credit Card Debt – Spicing Things Up a Little

Hi everyone. Tricia here with another update. I cannot believe that summer is almost over and school will be starting soon. Oh my…how time did fly.

Things in our financial arena could be better right now. I was a little more relaxed with tracking our finances (ok, I was lazy and didn’t keep a watchful eye on everything) and we spent more money than we probably should. We still do not have credit card debt, but we are not contributing to our savings account or paying off debt like I had hoped for this month.

This time, I’m not saying, “Hopefully next month things will be better.”

No, this time things will be better. How? We are ditching our debit card and the one credit card we use for cash back and pay off in full multiple times a month. We are going back to good ‘ole cash.

If you followed my story, I’ve mentioned many times that I do not like using cash. In fact, I’m still not crazy about it. But now that our credit card debt has been paid off, I have lost some motivation. Sure, we have other debt to pay off (student loans and mortgage), but I do not have the same passion to pay that off as I did with the credit card debt.

We need a challenge.

I thought about it for a while, and using only cash seemed to be a perfect fit. We’ll have a certain amount to use every week and once the cash is gone – there is no more spending. The cash will need to cover everything that is not normally paid via automatic payment or check. I have a feeling that it will lead us to do some creative things to make it through the end of the week at times. It should help spur our creativity and get our frugal juices flowing again. They were still there, just a little stale. Time to spice things up!

I’m pretty excited about the change in our financial routine. Perhaps it was time to try something a little different. I’ve always said that everyone should make their own recipe for financial success by taking tidbits from here and there. I guess I never thought about modifying that recipe every now and then just to keep things fresh. Perhaps this is just what we need right now in this stage of our lives

With that, I will conclude by saying that September will be a great month and I have to congratulate Beks – she just paid off her credit card debt. Woohoo!

Posted by Tricia on August 28, 2009 at 9:03 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 11 Comments »
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Life After Credit Card Debt – July Update

Hi everyone! Tricia here again with a monthly check-in.

Before I talk about our finances for July, I’d like take the spotlight for a moment to discuss something very personal.

I have been suffering from anxiety for quite a few years now, although I didn’t recognize it until recently.

Many people suffer from anxiety. I didn’t recognize it, though, for what it really was. I always thought that it was our financial situation that caused me to have the constant worry. We were in debt – why wouldn’t I be excessively worried, right?

Once our credit card debt was paid off things didn’t get better. They actually got worse (probably because not too long after it was paid off I stopped blogging regularly – which I think was therapeutic in a way). I finally realized that it wasn’t normal.

I’m glad to report that with my doctor’s help, I am feeling a lot better. I wanted to share this with all of you now in case it may help someone else out there. I can only imagine how different things would have been during our debt reduction journey if I realized what was going on. While it’s normal to have some worry, mine was excessive.

For more reading about anxiety, here is a link to MedlinePlus.

Now on to our July finances. First things first – we still do not have credit card debt! Yay! July was an okay month. We did visit with family this month so there were extra expenses and unfortunately some unpaid time off. That hurt a little, but it’s always worth every penny to visit with family. I almost added to our savings account this month, but we had yet another doctor bill trickle in. We should be all set with doctor bills for a while, unless there is something else our doctors forgot to bill us for.

August should be a good month. There are no trips and no more doctor bills (hopefully!). It looks like we’ll finally be able to put a nice deposit into our savings account.

Here’s to a great August! It’s hard to believe summer is going by so quickly!!

Posted by Tricia on July 31, 2009 at 11:45 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 7 Comments »
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Life After Credit Card Debt – June was a Frustrating Month

Hi everyone! Tricia here. Two months after paying off our credit card debt, I feel like we are hemorrhaging money and it is frustrating.

One of the big things we did after paying off our debt was to get all of us into a good doctor. We got some of the bills last month, but we got the biggie bill this month. Beks just talked about health and finances. They are definitely related when you see the bill! I had mentally prepared myself for the moment I opened the envelope, but nothing really prepares you to see a bill approaching $1,000.

Thank goodness we do have the money and we get a 10% discount if we pay within 30 days. I’m also very glad we have been shelling out the money for an individual health insurance plan. That bill would have made me faint without it (it covered 70%).

It’s money well spent, though. We know that there is nothing seriously wrong with my husband (he had an expensive test done), our son is feeling better and I’m slowly starting to feel like myself again after taking supplements for vitamin deficiencies. While we were in debt reduction mode, we put a lot of that off. We shouldn’t have. I see now that we may have been too aggressive with paying off our debt by cutting spending that we shouldn’t have cut. But, you live and learn.

I discussed last month that our car was playing with us with the check engine light. Well, it wasn’t playing and I ended up jinxing myself. After shelling out almost $300 for what the mechanic thought was the problem – it still isn’t fixed. With all of the computers in cars, you’d think that if something was faulty the computer could tell you exactly where the problem lies. Instead, our car just notes that it is a general problem that could be a number of things. I have no idea how much this will cost to finally fix, since it’s a matter of fixing one thing and if it doesn’t correct the problem you fix the next thing on the list.

So money is flowing out freely right now. It’s frustrating. On the bright side, we haven’t had to put anything on our credit cards. So we still are credit card debt-free. Too many more months of financial hemorrhaging and that may not be the case.

I guess even though we achieved our goal of paying off our credit card debt, there will still be the bumps in the road that I talked about a few years ago. We’ll get through this rough patch and then be on our way again with increasing our financial health.

The road isn’t easy, but it will get easier. That’s what I’ve been saying to myself this month. Hopefully things will improve in July.

Posted by Tricia on June 26, 2009 at 11:39 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 22 Comments »
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Life After Credit Card Debt – May Was a Very Interesting Month

Hi Everyone! Tricia here. It’s time for a monthly update to see how we are doing. I will do these at least once a month on the last Friday of the month.

First things first – are we still credit card debt free? Yes! In the back of my mind, I kept wondering if something would happen out of the blue and set us back again. I was anxiously waiting for the end of the month to see if anything happened. A few days ago we did have a little scare when the check engine light came on in our car. We reset the light and so far it hasn’t come back on again so we hope it was a general misfire on our car’s part (it has done that in the past). I hope I didn’t jinx ourselves right there. We’ll see.

With things going so well, you’d think that we were able to replenish our savings account since we used some of it to pay off the last of our credit card debt. Well, we haven’t yet. We spent money on some other things.

The most important one was our health. Sure, we went to the doctor’s when we were sick while we were paying off debt, but it was a very reactionary approach to overall health. We decided that we needed to be proactive with our health and work to make ourselves as healthy as possible. A big part of that was finding a doctor that will help us with that. I wasn’t quite prepared for the sticker shock when it came to making sure our bodies have the correct fuel it needs to function properly.

For example, we found out that our son was deficient in a few vitamins and minerals. The total monthly cost for his supplements is $55/month. That will ease up once we revise our diets yet again (we did it once already to reduce sodium). I’ve been busy reading up on vitamins and minerals and trying to come up with a better menu for all of us since I suffer from vitamin deficiency as well. It’s funny, we thought we were eating healthier but in the process we were stripping ourselves of some very important nutrients.

It’s tough to spend money like we have this month, but we are taking care of the biggest assets we have…ourselves.

Another thing we did was spend money on our son’s extracurricular activities. We bought the bare minimum before, but we spent some more money there to get him better equipped. We also bought some equipment so mom and dad could participate as well to help him practice. It has been some very nice family time together.

Lastly, here is a big shocker. In a very weird turn of events, I was approached with a job offer. When one door closes, another one opens (life is funny that way). After some lengthy discussions, we decided that I would accept the job offer. Since I have been working at home for the past few years, I needed a new wardrobe since I would be working outside of the home in a professional position. I also decided to get a professional haircut to spruce myself up a bit.

Working at home has been a big money saver for us and I enjoyed the job that I had. It was a tough decision. In the end, we decided that the contacts I would make in regards to our business tipped the scales to the new position. There is a lot of value in that and I plan to fully capitalize on it. I’ve become pretty detached to the outside world since I started working at home and it was time to get back out there and network and make some friends.

That brings me to a business update. Things are still going well although sales have not increased this month. It’s been hectic around here with my new position and my husband is at the same job. We’re still getting used to yet another new schedule. Add our son’s events into the mix and it’s often go-go-go for us. It takes a while for the waves to calm down after rocking the boat. May has been a crazy month and we didn’t add any new products to our business or do any promotion.

We may decide to put some money into our savings this weekend. We have a healthy buffer in our checking account right now since we often ran things so close while in debt reduction mode. We could use that to put a little bit more into our savings. I have been updating my NetWorth IQ profile so if we end up using some of our buffer for our savings it will show up there in May’s update.

I’m not sure what next month will bring. We will likely be bringing in more money and we won’t be spending as much money so it should be a great month for us. Hopefully we will be able to contribute a large amount to our savings account. Then again, I never thought I would be working another job right now so it just goes to show how life is unpredictable. I guess we’ll see what June brings.

Hope all of you are doing well!

Posted by Tricia on May 29, 2009 at 10:27 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 7 Comments »
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Life After Credit Card Debt – Starting on Our Next Journey

Today will be the last day that I regularly write on here. I will be visiting time to time and you’ll probably see my name in the comments. I will be posting at least once a month, on the last Friday of the month. If something big happens and I’d like to post before the end of the month, I will also post those updates on a Friday. Don’t forget, you can always subscribe to this blog’s feed in your feed reader, or you can receive daily updates in your inbox. All of my posts from this point forward will start with “Life After Credit Card Debt” so you can easily tell which posts are my updates.

Since this is my last regular post, I have a few “administrative” things to mention…

For those who have their $25 ING Savings Referral links posted, please continue to send an email when they get used. I am still monitoring and taking care of the list until it is finished. If you are thinking of opening a savings account, the deal at ING is still a good one. You get a $25 bonus when you open an account with $250. You will also help a reader since they get $10. Please see the ING Savings Account Referral page for self-serve links.

I can still be reached by using the contact form. All you need to do is mention that the email is for me and it will be forwarded to me. I’ve received quite a few emails the past few years and if any of you would like to give an update on how you are doing, I’d still love to hear them! Or if you are looking to vent, I am here for that too

The “how we did it” recap post is still in progress. I will post when it is finished.

I will be tracking my Net Worth using my NetWorthIQ profile. The information will be condensed since I won’t be breaking down every detail, but you can see how we are doing overall. Here is the link to my profile. If you are a member over there, you can also leave comments and send messages. It’s a pretty neat online program.

This is not a goodbye since I will still be blogging on here – it just won’t be as often. But I will be around in the comments supporting Beks as she works to pay off her debt and I’ll be stopping by some of your blogs as well since I am way behind with my blog reading.

With that, I’ll see you with the next update

Posted by Tricia on April 30, 2009 at 9:45 PM in Life After Credit Card Debt | 10 Comments »
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