Six Figure Debt

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.

I ran across this article in a Detroit Newspaperand it actually echoed some of my feelings regarding the current economic situation. 

“Many years ago — long before anyone started talking about a credit crisis — my mother stopped borrowing money, telling anyone who would listen that credit cards should be used “only in an emergency.”

You will notice that all the debt bars on the right side of the blog have been updated.  I have put together a spread sheet of all our non-secured debt and you can see it in all its glory on the right side of the blog.   In the past I hadn’t included all the damage as I wasn’t serious about eliminating the debt.  The past two months have seen me and my wife get on the same page and get serious about debt elimination.  I think it took me contemplating personal bankruptcy for my wife to really understand the dire financial straights we were facing.

I was reading a newspaper online the other day and came across an article explaining when and how I was going to receive my “economic stimulus” tax refund.  According to my social security number, my check will be mailed to me on May 9.  We should get $1800, $600 each for my wife and I and $300 each for my two children.  While $1800 is not a huge amount of money, it is a nice chunk of change to throw at our debt.

Our debt reduction plans took a small hit this week as we were hit with $300. in unexpected medical bills.  It isn’t anything we can’t handle but it put a serious crimp in our debt repayment this month.  Looks like the minimum payments for at least one of the three credit cards.  We will still make a double payment on the home equity line of credit.

I will update you on our debt this week; we did manage to take a chunk out of our debt, reducing our HELOC by $800, cutting a few hundred of each of the three credit cards and even adding a few hundred dollars to our emergency fund.

This is easy for the wife and I, we are very focused on our goals.  They are…..in order!

1.  Eliminate 25% of our total revolving debt.  This amounts to about 25k between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2008.  We can do this, we are making enough money and have more on the way when our small business opens in March 2008.  In addition my other Internet sites are beginning to show a serious profit, maybe as much as 20k in 2008.

It is odd that I have created a budget every year for my department at work, but never created a budget for my family.  When I realized that my wife and I had never really tracked or budgeted our expenses, it was as if I had a out of body experience, why wouldn’t I run my family’s finances as I would my company’s?

Today I am going to outline the creation and implementation of a family budget.

It isn’t painful and should pay large dividends as we pay down our personal debt.

When I think back on my college/early work years, it was a struggle but it was certainly the best of times.

I started in my current career when I was 18 years old, I’ve been at it for 21 years, seen my highs and lows, but mostly highs.  One of the things that I always reflect on was when I was struggling the worst financially.

I started my career making 16k a year, I stayed at that job for 6 years because not only was I able to pay my bills (I had zero debt) I was learning a lot about my craft from some of the best in the business.

The first thing we did and are still doing is adjusting our lifestyle.  Now that we have rid ourselves of the obligations we incurred when I was making a lot more money, we are better able to chip away at the debt that is staring us in the face.

The good news is we have pared back our lifestyle and the debt isn’t growing and we still make a great income.  Bad news, we have a long road to hoe before we will be free of debt and able to fund our retirement.

This is our plan to get back in financial shape.

• HELOC                              $ 61,622.16
• Credit Card # 1                $  15,000.00
• Credit Card # 2                $ 11,206.94
• Credit Card # 3                $ 21,209.65
• Misc. Attorney fees         $ 28,000.00

Debt to be repaid.                 $  137,038.75

A large portion of the money we owe, 40k is a loan that we made to ourselves from our home equity line of credit to start our new business.  It is being repaid by the company and should be even in 5 years.  The rest, approximately 97k is ours to pay for no matter how long it takes.

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