Blogging Away Debt Our Journeys to a Debt-Free Life

by Matt Fildes

Hello everyone! For those who may not know, I initially interviewed to be part of this blog last year with this post (Matt’s Intro). Unfortunately, I was not selected by the community to be one of the original 4 posters (tbh, I was a little heart broken). Despite this, I was not deterred from getting rid of my debt. Now that only 2 of the original bloggers remain, I was asked by Jeffrey (with some help from the other bloggers) to start blogging here on a weekly basis; I will be taking over the Tuesday spot. I could not be happier to share my journey with you.

A couple of months ago, I actually posted an update of where I stood in my debt journey in the comments section of one of Ashley’s posts. I’ll just copy and paste it in it’s entirety:

Well…. I hadn’t heard back from Jeffrey so I figured I’d give you an update…so here goes… From my introductory post, my debts were student loans @ $86,797.91, a car loan @ $10,188.50 and a mortgage @ $71,444.55. My current debt stands at $65,191.89 of student loans, no car loan (paid off last month) and $70,661.61 of the mortgage remaining. A quick calculation shows I’ve paid off $32,577.46 worth of debt in 6 months. I currently make $60,000 a year or $847.50 a week after all my with withholdings are taken out.

My original timeline, when I wrote my introductory piece, was to be debt free in 42 months. My current timeline is to be debt free in 23 months.

Here’s what I did to pay off so much so quickly in only 6 months:

• I got rid of Directv, firstly. This saved me 89.37 per month. Unfortunately, I was locked into one of those 2 year contracts but you can get out if you pay them $20 per month remaining on the contract. I paid $260 to get out, but I recouped that money in only 3 months. I was only watching ESPN at the time and we have Netflix, which made cutting the cord easy.
• I had almost $5,000 in an emergency fund which I decreased to $1,000 and used the $4,000 to pay down my car.
• I had $1,000 in an investment fund which I cleared out to pay down my car.
• We have a really good system in our house where I pay the mortgage and all the house bills (gas, electric, water, sewer, garbage and internet) and my GF buys all the food. This said, I have a weekly, $0 based budget, where I determine my weekly expenses and “pay myself” $70 cash from an ATM on payday for any misc. food and gas for my car. I then put the rest of the money towards debt. I get paid on Wednesday and by Thursday I normally have $0 in my checking account. The $70 I pay myself was a trial and error of which amount of money allows me to go the whole week with some cash, without having any left over on the next payday.
• I do a lot of driving for work (which is usually where my $70 cash goes), which they reimburse at $.56/mile. I get paid for this and reimbursement for my cell phone at the beginning of each month. I use this extra to pay down debt, which can be anywhere from an extra $300-$600 per month.
• I’ve sold a lot of things during the summer to make some extra money to put on debt,
• By far the biggest thing I did to pay down the debt was withdraw from an old retirement fund I had with the government. When I fully withdrew the account it had roughly $24,000 of pre-tax dollars. After taxes and the penalty I was left with $15,000 or so. HIGHLY controversial (especially if you read over at Man vs. Debt) but I had help making the decision. I sought out a Dave Ramsey ELP (which is a fantastic program) who figured that for my age (27), my discipline and dedication, the amount of money was relatively low, I could pay it back quickly and it was ALL going towards paying down debt then the financial 10% penalty was worth the emotional benefit of having less debt. I don’t regret this decision for one bit.

As you can see, things are a lot different when you’re unmarried and without kids. I can sacrifice in many ways that you could never (and for good reason) do with your husband and two daughters. Although great for paying off debt, my lifestyle is certainly not without its cons either- I’ve lost touch with most of my college friends and even though my family is only 1.5 hr drive from me, I haven’t visited much in the past year. But in my opinion, it’s all temporary, and once the burden is gone, I can budget for night’s out and travel and vacations and all the other fun stuff I’ve forgotten about.

Thanks for listening and sorry for the length, just a lot to go over, lol. There’s light at the end of the tunnel!!

So that’s where I stood as of September 30th and not much has changed. I continued to pay down my debt into October, but given the holidays and needing a little distraction from debt pay down, I took “off” November and then used December to build my emergency fund back up. All said, I’m ready to hit it hard again and cannot wait to get some pushing and prodding from the BAD community!

I’ll be posting my as of 1/7/14 debt numbers at the end of the week.

-Matt