by Tricia
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how far we have come. Both in terms of our debt (and more recently with my weight).
Why did it take so long to decide that it was time to pay off our debt? Why did we insist on not tackling our debt and keep on charging things? Why did we just live with our debt? What was stopping us from deciding that today was the day and we didn’t want any more debt?
So many questions, and I think for us the answer revolved around a certain theme…
We thought greener grass was around the corner. In our minds, we were spending more than we made because we thought we would make more money later to pay it off. Live life now…pay later. After all, that’s what most of the credit card companies tell you. We deserved to have a nice camera. We deserved to have a nice computer. Who needs to save up money for purchases like that? We had a nice shiny credit card with available credit. Sure, there’s something called finance charges we’d have to deal with. But they can’t be that bad…right? WRONG!
Looking back, we didn’t need greener grass around the corner. We could have started working to pay off our debt when we were making less money. Even if we were only paying $20 extra a month. We could have been hitting the debt as hard as we could with what we had. I know by looking at our monthly numbers that we could have made it work.
If I had done this exercise some time ago, we could have been debt free right now. So, if you are in debt and haven’t started a debt reduction plan, try going through the questions above. Perhaps it can help you.