After Hitting Rock Bottom, an Epiphany!
After I’d hit rock bottom emotionally and financially, I knew we had to get out of credit card debt if we had any chance of living our dreams without blowing up our whole lives in the process.
I made a plan for paying off our $13,500 of credit card debt, but was unsure of what the next step would be. Would one of us be able to take a lower-paying job just by paying off the cards? Which one of us? What if the new career continued to be low-paying after several years? Would the other person be stuck with their job?
Then, the miraculous, mathematical epiphany (courtesy of the debt pay down advisor at Bankrate.com): We could have all our debt, including the house, paid off in 5-6 years if we stayed at our current jobs.
It was so unbelievable, I ran the calculator three different times with slightly different variables. I even worked it out by hand to see if I came up with similar numbers.
Just imagine what life would be like with no debt…I could be a copywriter, open a photography studio with my sister, become the next Diablo Cody…My husband could live out his Indiana Jones fantasy by going back to school for an archeology degree…Sure, we’d still have taxes, insurance and utility bills, but just imagine! We’d only need an income of about $30,000 to live our current lifestyle and still save for retirement.
Around the same time, I started listening to that crazy Dave Ramsey bastard on my iPod, and I really started to believe it was possible.
Though I tend to only write in my journal when I’m depressed, I went through a brief Oprah-recommended phase where I kept a happiness journal:
From Finance Girl’s Journal
10/9/07
[Finance Girl's husband] and I had a talk about keeping focused on paying off our debt. He is so on fire about it, even thinking we’ll be done in less than 5 years (3 years!?!)
When I tell people about our plan, they laugh.
But it is quite possibly the best idea I’ve ever had.
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