MARCH 9, 2010
For the last two years, we have been working on reducing our debt. We have paid off five credit cards in that time, worth over $12,000. Our next project is to pay off our motorcycle debt, and then work on our mortgage payment. To date, the mortgage and motorcycle payments are the only payments we have left to pay off! We HOPE to pay off the bike before the end of this year! What a wonderful feeling that will be to have NO DEBTS other than the mortgage!
This page will be sort of like a “work in progress” as we leave debt reduction tips and our progress on paying off our own debt. I hope you will come by often to see how we are doing!! 
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Dave Ramsey, financial guru, has many books published on debt reduction. The one thing that we have learned from him that we implemented in our own debt reduction is to take a look at all of the bills you have, and begin your own debt reduction by starting with the bill that has the highest interest rate! Ours of course, was our credit cards!
Think about the credit cards you have and the balances owed on each one of them. If you were to make just the minimum payment due on each credit card, have you actually stopped to calculate how long it will take you to pay off that credit card; AND how much interest you would have paid by then??? It is INSANE to think about how much interest the credit card companies are making off of each and every one of us! When we actually did this, and seriously took a look at what our credit cards were doing to us financially, we immediately agreed “NO MORE CREDIT CARDS…IF WE CAN’T PAY CASH FOR IT, WE DON’T NEED IT”!!! And we stuck to that!!!
For the last two years, we have not put one single cent on ANY of the credit cards that we had! We only worked at paying them off! We took every penny we could find that wasn’t allocated for something else, and applied it towards the credit cards! We started with the one that had the highest interest rate, but lowest amount owed! Do you know why we started like that? Number one reason was to pay off that high interest rate! But, number two reason was to see progress quickly!
The quicker you see progress, the more apt you are to stick with it! When we saw the first one paid off, we took what we were paying towards that one, and added that amount to the next credit card on top of what we were paying already! It did take two years, but if we had continued paying just the minimum amounts due, we would STILL be paying them off on our 60th birthdays!!
Keep in mind, we continued with the minimum amounts owed on all other cards; but really focused on the one that we wanted to pay off. Extra jobs that I picked up in my cleaning business went towards paying off that card! If the paycheck was a bit higher due to overtime, we took a portion of that overtime and applied it towards the credit cards. If we sold something and didn’t need the money for something else, we applied what we could to those credit cards!
$12,000 may not sound like a lot to some of you who have higher credit card debt, but to us, it was a lot of money! So we stuck to it, and just this last week, we were finally able to pay off our LAST CREDIT CARD!! I can’t tell you how GOOD that feels!
We have NO CREDIT CARDS! When we began this journey, we promised each other we would not charge anything on these credit cards again! We shredded every card that we had. When one card would get paid off, we called that company and told them to close the account immediately!! Some tried to persuade us to keep the account open for those “just in case emergencies”, but we said “NO THANK YOU”!!
Today we deal strictly with cash! If we don’t have the money for something that we want or need, we save for it until we do. Period, over and out! No going back to credit cards!
Now that all of the credit cards are paid off, we are now working on paying off our motorcycle. On March 7th, I called for a pay off balance. On that day, the balance was $9221.00. As we pay off this last debt, we will chart our progress. It’s good for us to be able to see the progress, and it’s good to chart it, so we can be accountable to each other in our progress.
As I said before, we hope you will walk on this journey with us. If you have stories to share of how you got out of debt, I would LOVE to hear them!!!
Until then, remember:
“CREDIT CARDS????? WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING CREDIT CARDS!!!”
