I remember the first time I couldn't pay my credit card balance in full for the month. This was back in the Fall of 2000. I had charged over eight hundred dollars that month, mostly on restaurant food and various forms of entertainment. I had nothing to show for my purchases. I remember thinking, "It's ok, I will just pay it off next month."
Well, it has been nearly 120 months and I am further in debt by a few orders of magnitude! Needless to say this happened by my own stupidity and in my defense the majority of my debt is now of the so-called "good" debt-student loans.
On top of my earlier stupidity, my family and I have lived off of credit cards and student loans for the past four years while I went to school. While not working during college enabled me to focus my efforts on my academic pursuits (I earned high marks during college) it left us with a skyscraper of debt that we must now deal with.
The good news is that since the beginning of the year we have not used our credit card. We are committed to living within our means now. We have started a budget and are following it. We are slowly paying down our debt and are saving and investing.
In future posts I want to share our budget system and start to track our net worth to help motivate us in our efforts. I also want to start to discuss saving and investing. Good luck to those of you in similar situations. Through education, patience, and persistence we can all get out of debt and become financially secure.
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