I've been noticing some new members joining SA blogs recently who are pretty freaked out by their financial situations. I thought it would help if I reintroduced myself and spilled my gruesome financial saga. It's not exactly a success story yet, but I have made some progress and gotten more upbeat about my finances!

If you have your own personal horror stories that have happy endings (or are headed that way), maybe you could share on your own blogs so these new members know they're not alone and that there's a light at the end of the tunnel (and that it's not the proverbial freight train bearing down on them)!

I just pulled my own head out of the sand about my finances 15 months ago. I was in charge of finances for both me and my partner AS. I'd tried off and on to keep a budget and pay down debts with little success over the years, and saving seemed impossible. I would transfer credit card balances around thinking that would help me pay them off faster, but all it would do was encourage us to charge up the first card again.

I was naive about finances and, like many other Americans, assumed that when I earned more I would be able to straighten everything out. Of course our raises would cover cost-of-living increases and little else, so the debt never really went away. Worst of all, even though we were charging on credit cards pretty freely much of the time, I never felt as if we were living well. I never felt prosperous, so the spending wasn't even comforting, and the bills were awful. But I wasn't sure how to stop.

Then my 2nd partner NT moved in. He wanted to decorate the condo and we wanted to let him, because we'd never done anything with it and it wasn't very nice. NT wasn't working at first, and AS had an inconsistent income from a freelance job where the employer kept stringing her along saying she'd hire her full-time soon. Eventually she left that and got a full-time job that also paid for her grad school, so things got a little better. Then NT got his work permit and started getting some temp work.

Still, we were all spending in different directions with no plan, no budget and no one in charge of finances (besides me making sure I paid bills on time, even if it meant dipping into the line of credit on our checking account). And those months with only one steady income had really put us further in the hole. One day in March 2007, I had a scary moment where I realized we were nearing the limit on our line of credit. I did a rough estimate of our monthly income and bills and saw that we only had enough income to cover basic bills yet were all spending what we wanted, whether it was me getting drinks after work, or NT buying furniture and housewares, or AS eating fast food every day for lunch.

I put the brakes on and let the other two know that we had to change our living, fast. I looked at our past month's statements and showed them we spent over $1200 on eating and drinking out. That shocked us all. Then I did a budget and showed them that we barely had enough income to cover bills and groceries, and that we'd have to quit all frivolous spending until we had more income coming in.

There were a few hitches, but generally we all buckled down and stopped spending. It was a huge lifestyle change for all of us. Luckily NT and I already liked to cook, so we were able to get by without going out at all. We would still get a bit of spending money here and there, whenever we had covered all our bills and had any money left over, but it wasn't much. It was kind of embarrassing the rare times we did go out with friends because they could see us discussing whether we could each afford one beer or two, and meanwhile everyone else is ordering three or four drinks plus food. But for the first time I had determination fueled by desperation. I really felt like if we didn't change this time, we were going to go under.

So I had our spending under control, and it wasn't fun but it was working. But there were so many unknowns in my financial world that were lurking around, worrying me. I didn't have a grasp of our total debt; I hadn't calculated it in over a year. And I knew there were some lingering financial activities going on in the UK for NT: I didn't know what they were and sort of assumed he was taking care of them, but I didn't know any of the details yet. And most of all, I knew deep down that just paying the minimums wasn't going to make our debt (however much it was) go away, but I didn't have a plan for paying it down. Also, NT was planning to go to college soon, and we'd already committed to visiting England for his sister's wedding in the future. Those were two big bills that I had no idea how I was going to pay.

How's that for a grim picture? Tune in to the next chapter when I calculate our huge debt totals and nearly have a heart attack!