Plastic Surgery

This morning I was reading the new secrets over at PostSecret and I saw this one:

What relief this person must have felt, mailing in that last bill. It made me think how much I look forward to doing the same, to being finally free of debt.

I got my first credit card when I was 16. I thought I was so grown up and cool. For the first four years, I was extremely responsible with my card. I would pay off the balance in full every single month. But, life happens. I got pregnant with the Mermaid and had to quit all three of my jobs. I was unable to pay the balances off in full. By the time I was four months pregnant, I had about $1,000 on the card.

When I was about six or seven months pregnant with the Mermaid, the Knight and I foolishly moved out of his parents house into our own apartment. The Knight was working at a different job and earning less than half of what he earns now, I was still in school.

At first everything was fine. But, life happens. My commute to school was an hour and a half long both ways, so as you can imagine we were putting a lot of money into gas. Gas prices went up. My car broke down a few times. Pretty soon we were relying on our credit cards to get us by. Groceries went on the cards. Christmas went on the cards. We even used the cars to pay utility bills! Pretty soon we were way over our heads in debt. Something had to be done.

My mother offered us the top level of her house to live in so we could pay off debt and save for a house. We stopped using the cards. But because we didn't really know how to go about it, we were unable to save money and put a dent in our debt. Every month we would wonder, where did all the money go?

So we decided to do Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover. And we are doing much better. We know where our money is going, because we have a written budget. The first step of the Total Money Makeover is to build a small emergency fund, so that if an unexpected emergency occurs (car breaks down, fridge breaks, etc.) you wouldn't have to use a credit card to get by. It took us almost a month, but we finally have our emergency fund. Which means that we no longer need to keep our credit cards around in case of an emergency. So, Saturday night the Knight and I got plastic surgery. We cut up every single one of our credit cards. How relieving! How empowering! With every snip of the scissors we said NO MORE! No more being a slave to debt! And this is our result:

We are now on Step 2, the debt snowball. I have a great feeling about this. I know that we will get out of debt as soon as possible. And then, I will know what it feels like to be in the same position as the person that sent in the secret. I will know what it feels like to be debt free.

Plastic Surgery