A blog to help me document my journey out of debt.
About Me:
ceejay74
I'm the CFO of a three-adult, two-child, two-cat household. There's me (CJ, age 49), my husband (NT, age 50), my wife (AS, age 44), and our kids AA (age 13) and SL (age 11). The cats are named Whiskey and Clue and they're about 12 years old.
Until July 2007 we hadn't been serious about financial stability, but then we started focusing on paying down our massive debt, building an emergency fund and saving for retirement. In October 2010, we finished paying off all of our credit card debt--over $70,000! Adding in student loans and mortgages, we've paid off more than $250,000 of debt so far. In June 2015, we used a windfall to pay off all our remaining non-home-related debt!
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Big picture goals:
Buy a rental property in Minneapolis in 2022
8x income by age 65 OR Coast FIRE by 2031 (tracking retirement in two ways at the moment)
Yeah, but you should've seen how fast I built the debt up in the first place! :-)
Seriously though, I'm lucky to have 3 incomes flowing in. Before that though, when there were only two, when I decided we needed to stop going into debt and reverse the money flow, I basically just cut out pleasures that cost money for a few months. We got very little spending money, we weren't allowed to use credit cards, and that basically meant cooking at home every single meal, not going out anywhere, and finding cheap ways to entertain ourselves and keep our friends. (Hosting happy hours at our place was cheap; hosting a potluck BYOB happy hour would be even cheaper!) It was a brutal change of lifestyle, but it did it for us. Now we can breathe easier, but we still have to say "no" or "wait" to many things we want.
You are in a much hard place, koppur, so don't ask too much of yourself. Even just maintaining your current level of debt would be an amazing accomplishment! Things will change though. :-)
December 30th, 2007 at 07:13 am 1198998818
December 30th, 2007 at 02:48 pm 1199026086
December 30th, 2007 at 04:17 pm 1199031477
December 30th, 2007 at 11:53 pm 1199058802
Seriously though, I'm lucky to have 3 incomes flowing in. Before that though, when there were only two, when I decided we needed to stop going into debt and reverse the money flow, I basically just cut out pleasures that cost money for a few months. We got very little spending money, we weren't allowed to use credit cards, and that basically meant cooking at home every single meal, not going out anywhere, and finding cheap ways to entertain ourselves and keep our friends. (Hosting happy hours at our place was cheap; hosting a potluck BYOB happy hour would be even cheaper!) It was a brutal change of lifestyle, but it did it for us. Now we can breathe easier, but we still have to say "no" or "wait" to many things we want.
You are in a much hard place, koppur, so don't ask too much of yourself. Even just maintaining your current level of debt would be an amazing accomplishment! Things will change though. :-)
CJ