Six Figure Debt

This Christmas season has been much more enjoyable than last year.  A year ago we were without work and had no money left in our emergency fund, this year we BOTH have great jobs and we are quickly repaying debt and rebuilding our emergency fund.  I know it sounds very basic, but the emergency fund has become an obsession.  We are throwing every extra cent we earn into the emergency fund as we understand that this economy could see one or both of us unemployed in the blink of an eye. We won’t stop funding the fund until we have a solid six months of living expenses in our savings.

Now that Mrs Bad Spender and I are employed and in the process of debt reduction we have put together a budget to accomplish our goals.  Our goals are to be debt free in 12 months, start contributing to our children’s college funds again, save for a vacation and to begin rebuilding our wealth.  This budget is our first attempt to get our finances under control, we actually started budgeting last month but we needed a month to tweak it before we were ready to lock in our figures.So, this is our December budget and we have not strayed.  We even subtracted money from the “entertainment fund” because we really don’t go out that much anyway.  We used the money to purchase Christmas presents for the kids and added some to the Emergency fund.  The budget is a work in progress, we will continue to squeeze more and more money from it to repay debt, but we really need to get the Emergency fund fully funded.

We are taking the advice of Dave Ramsey and we have stopped paying our credit card payments, except for American Express because they were willing to drop the interest rate on our credit card.

As I said in the previous post, none of the credit card were willing to provide and help with our current situation so we have simply started saving our money and not paying the credit cards.

My situation is a little different because when I married and had kids I had a good job, a healthy 401k and equity in my house.  Through a series of poor decisions and  a major job loss I ended up with over $140k in secured and unsecured debt.  The normal signs of trouble weren’t there because almost half the debt is housing losses and business start-up capital that I used on my home equity line.

Many of us do however see the signs of financial trouble before they hit, and either ignore or don’t recognize them, here are 8 signs that you may be in financial trouble.

My wife and I have finally decided to look for another house to rent.  We can’t purchase a new home because we already own a home in another state, thank GOD it is rented or who knows where we would be financially.  The renters cover everything, including the taxes so the house is a break even proposition for us.  Without the renters we would be forced to short sale or worse, foreclose.

January proved to be a good month in our debt reduction quest.  As you can see from the graphs on the left, we made a significant dent in our debt.

Overall we reduced out outstanding debt by  $4261.38 in January alone.  We are using Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball and I am really encouraged by our progress.  I have a great spreadsheet that I downloaded and I pay the exact amount the spreadsheet says to pay every month, it is amazing how disciplined you can be when it is layed out for you.

Its been almost a year since I made the LAST payment on my car and it feels great.  I doubt I will ever own a new car in my life again unless I can pay cash for it.  I simply have no interest in having a car payment again, EVER.  I may continue to buy a newer used car for my wife, but we don’t want the cost of owning a car.  Think about the payment and insurance for a second.

The other day I was wandering Wal-Mart picking up a few things for my wife’s business when I came upon the iphone in the electronics department.  I need a new phone as my two year old Motorola Q for some reason isn’t downloading my e-mail anymore.  I really rely on my Q for business and personal e-mail so I started to think I should look for a new phone.  Wal-Mart started selling the Apple iphone for $197 this month so I figured I would take a look at the phone.  The one at Wal-Mart for $197 is a 4 gig, which is likely just fine for me, the 8 gig model is $297.

I haven’t written anything in a few days as I was anticipating news on my wife’s job prospects, but as of Friday we hadn’t heard anything about the job.  My wife thinks she nailed the interview so we are hopeful.  This job could change everything for us, including a move to a new area of the city to be closer to her job.

As we look for ways to dump frivolous expenses, we are exploring any and all avenue’s to reduce debt.  here are  ways to deduce debt and eliminate the credit cards.

1.  Stop using debt.  No more credit cards, stop borrowing.  We are strictly a cash only family from this point forward.  We have one credit card for emergencies but once the emergency fund is full, that one goes too.