My husband began having more issues with his back and about a year after he returned to work, he had to quit. Since we had settled on the claim, we didn’t see any option but for us to switch places. I would look for work, get better health insurance, then we would wait a year for his pre-existing condition to be covered. We sold our house and moved into an apartment. We were finally able to get him seen by a great doctor and he got the back surgery that he so desperately needed. Then the medical bills started coming. It wasn’t bad since we had no other debt, we were able to pay them off fairly quickly.
My new job was going great, but I felt the push to go back and get my degree. I found a school that had an adult accelerated program. The program plus some additional classes that I needed put me at 24k in student loan debt. Getting a degree did help my career but the student loan was just the start of our journey back into debt. While my husband was home with our kids he decided to also go back to school and get his degree. He used the same school but a different program and took out 20k in student loan debt.
The student loans have a delay after graduation until you have to start repaying them, so it was easy at first to not think too much about them. We had decided a year before we graduated to get another credit card that we would use for travel only. We had planned a trip to Europe in 2016 and felt that it was much safer than using a debit card. We were pretty good about paying off the card for a while. Getting tax refunds and large bonuses at work helped. The next few years moved us around a bit with different jobs, and slowly overtime we crept back into a mess.
We wanted a nicer family vehicle, then we needed a second car, so we got a small commuter car, all on payments of course. The problem with making more money is that you feel like you can afford bigger payments. We went to a seminar about money and took some classes. We started hearing that debt is not a problem if you use it the right way. All we heard was debt isn’t bad. We decided to sign-up for additional credit cards and use the power of leverage to get where we wanted to be.
Some of our new debt was used for starting up a business, then we decided we NEEDED other things. Since we were making more than six figures we didn’t feel the pain. We were making more money than we ever had before, and I loved spending it! Then I started to have more medical issues last year and disability insurance is great but when you make too much money….it does max out. So, the few weeks I was off work, we were still paying our bills, but we leaned on the credit cards a little more than was comfortable. New medical bills started piling up and we paid them with the credit cards.
After I went back to work, we started to realize that we needed to reign in this mess and get it back under control. I started making sure that all new charges were paid off in full every month along with the minimum payments. It’s amazing how slippery the debt slope is and how quickly you can end up even deeper than before. Spending so much time managing all of the credit card purchases and payments, not to mention the vehicle payments, we started opening our eyes to the bigger issue.
Our income tripled within 3 years due to both of us being able to work, as our kids have grown-up, along with a couple of promotions. Our debt went up just as quickly. Even though we can afford all of the payments, we are DONE. This is the “I’ve had it moment” that we never had before. We can’t give like we want; we can’t travel as much as we want. Stepping back and looking at the big picture we realized that we make too much money to be this broke. Here is where we start our new debt free journey. That is what this blog is about, doing what we know we need to do and sharing with others.