My Frugal Story- Part Four

The new job was great. It was something he knew he'd enjoy doing, it was 5 minutes from our house, and the hours were early enough that he'd be home in time to get the kids off the bus. The one glaring negative was that the salary was HALF what he had been making. My "extra" income was now needed to make ends meet. I thank God that he hit me in the head with the frugal blogs when He did, otherwise, I may have passed on this job if i had not been in "debt payoff mode".

So now the challenges began. We had to rework our budget to accomodate our new income.This was not easy. And we had to get "caught up" on bills we had not paid when my Husband was out of work. No matter how much I cut out budget down to bare bones, there was no way to do this, the numbers just didn't add up. I wrote letters to all my creidt cards, the heating oil company, and others, explaining my situation and that I would pay my minimums and what little extra I maybe able to add, when possible, until I was caught up.

This is where my hatred of credit card companies really began to come to a head. Through all of this they were very unforgiving. They raised my interest rates to the hightest legally allowed, due to my missed payments. This made my minimums much higher than before, and on our new lower income, these higher minimums were impossible for me to pay. As I tried to "work with" the companies, they contimued to charge me "late charges" because I wasn't sending in the full minimum (even though I was sending them money every month) .

By the end of 2007, even though I hadn't charged ANYTHING to my credit cards in 8 months, my balances were now higher than they had ever been. By March of 2008- I could take it no longer! We now owed almost $20,000 ($5000 more than a year earlier) and we hadn't charged anything in a year. I had to do something. So when my tax refund came I used that pay down some of my cards and get back to being able to may the minimums so no more late charges would be added. But really, it was too little to late, and we needed to do something.

We contacted a Debt Consolidation Co. and have been working with them ever since.