My Frugal Story- Part Two

As I began to make these changes. I was also regularly reading several blogs that really lead me to change the way I looked at Debt and Money. It was at this time that my Husband and I sat down, and over a few weeks and many discussions, we decided we needed to change our financial ways, and set up some long-term goals. This was the spring of 2007.

The first thing we wanted to do was increase our income in order to be able to pay off our credit cards. I had just heard about a possible part-time teaching position that I might be able to start in the fall, which I jumped on. Even though it didn't pay alot,and I would lose nearly 1/2 my take home pay to daycare and gas. We figured whatever money it brought in was "extra" and would go right to paying down our credit cards.

The second thing we knew we had to do was STOP using the credit cards. We could never get them paid off if we continued to add to the balances. We are not extravagant people and the balances on our credit cards were from things like abit of over spending at holidays, or b-days. Some of it was from tution payments when I first started working on my master's degree. Over about 5 years we, as a family, had accumulated about $15,000 in credit cards debt. (My husband had another $10,000 in his name from other adventures)

We set up a "payment plan" and had a 2 year goal of having this all paid off !! By using the additional income I would be making, cutting out a few "unecessary extras" and sticking to a budget it could be done! We were making really good progress from May 2007-August 2007, and then the unthinkable happened....