For many years of our marriage we both worked full time. We bought whatever we wanted. Clothes, cars, furniture, vacations, and lots of other stuff. We paid for most of it with credit. We've always been able to make the monthly payments and we've even managed to save a little.
It wasn't until we decided that I would stay home full time that we realized how in debt we were. Yes, we received our bills every month, but we didn't pay much attention to them. We just paid them and moved on to the next thing on the to do list.
You may be wondering why we didn't figure this our before I stopped working. Well, when I was pregnant with our second child, I was working part time and I had every intention of returning to work after my maternity leave. About half way through my leave I started to feel that putting my baby and my older child in daycare simply wasn't the right thing for us to do. My husband agreed. I still work for that company on an as needed basis, but it's not many hours and weeks may go by without any income for me.
So now that we had another mouth to feed and a reduction in our income we started to really look at our financial situation. Wow! The credit card bills. Yikes! (Mom if you are reading this, we can still make all of our payments! We just don't want to have them anymore!) We needed to make some changes. And fast.
The first thing we decided to tackle was our budget. I'll share how we did that in a future post. Next we decided to pay off those credit card bills. We estimate that it will take us 18 months to pay them off. Our goal for the year is to pay them down by 45%. It's a lofty goal, but I think we can do it. Each month I will update you on our progress.
What is your goal for paying down debt?
Tomorrow I'll start a 10 part series on our money saving tips.
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