Today I paid down the first of the BIG credit cards . . . not the highest balance, but the highest interest rate: 29.99 percent the total debt was approximately nine thousand dollars on this card, costing us approximately $250 each month in interest. Our minimum payment was barely a hundred dollars more than that, so we were never getting anywhere with the balance. Our monthly statement very nicely broke it down for us: If we made not additional charges using the card and only paid the minimum balance, it would take us twenty-five years to pay off, and the nine thousand dollars would ultimately cost us over thirty-one thousand dollars!
After talking about it, we decided that the best use of some extra cash would be to get rid of this card balance and use the minimum payment for it each month towards other cards. I submitted a payment of eight thousand dollars, and when I get the next bill, I will pay it off completely!!
My husband and I fight about a lot of things, but money is not one of them. We are completely in accord with one another when it comes to financial decisions, and fortunately, my husband’s income makes it so that we can do things like pay off a lingering credit card of nine thousand dollars. I am the saver and budgeter in our family; my husband is the spender. He asks me to keep him in line, in fact told me that I should take all the cards out of his wallet and give him an “allowance” on a prepaid card. I opined that might be taking things a tad far, as he is in his fifties after all, but you get the picture: he’s got a problem and wants help solving it.
So I’m keeping to my austerity campaign and helping to alleviate the stress on myself. Yoga is my must-have stress reliever, but paying off debt is coming up a fast a furious second. January 1 found us eighty thousand dollars in debt; February 1 finds us seventy thousand dollars in debt. Headed in the right direction.
