When this year, 2009, began my husband and I set a goal to be debt-free by December 31st, well thanks to a down-economy, much illness, and other Murphy-type incidences will we not make our goal of debt-free this year.
I am upset? Nope. Not Really.
Why? Because we are still closer to being debt-free than we began 2009.
So for my many new readers and some of my long time buddies I thought I would take us all on a trip down memory lane as to where we were 5 years ago. I cleaned out our filing cabinet this weekend and finally found all the old credit reports that hold the debt information. This is actually the first time I have sat and wrote in all down from the beginning. Scary stuff coming up!
Let's begin in January of 2004.
Our debt was:
Furniture Loan: $1,734
MBNS MC: $4,983
MBNA VISA: $6,608
Target CC: $410
Penneys CC: $110
Amazon CC: $345
Discover CC: $2,910
Chase: $217
Childrens Place: $201
Ford Credit: $2500
Campus Credit Van Loan: $2200
Sallie Mae: $2700
Bank of America: $11000
Sears: $3487
Care Credit: $821
Total: $40,226
It was this year that we began to search for a house to buy. Yep, with all that debt we thought we needed a mortgage to go with it. Well, we couldn't qualify for a mortgage because of our debt-to-income was way too high. Even in the time of easy credit and anyone with a pulse could qualify we could not. Not to mention our credit rating was lousy because with all those monthly payments many were paid late.
I began reading Mary Hunt and creditboards.com. I knew we needed to get our credit ratings up and paying off the debt was key so we began to dump some of it. We paid off all the little loans quickly but those larger ones were doing us in.
Then came the "year of the Hurricanes in Florida" and we found out we could get an SBA loan for damages, living expenses, etc. We applied for a loan and got it. With this we paid off some of the larger payments. But we still had to pay for this loan! Duh!
Our credit rating started improving as our debt-to-income ratio went down. We then began switching cards to 0% interest to save some money on the interest we were accruing.
By the time February of 2005 came around we had paid off $15,000 on our own and consolidated another $10,000 into the federal emergency loan. Yippee skippy we now qualified for a mortgage! With no down payment. With no closing costs. With no idea what we were doing!!!!
We walked into our new house with the keys in hand on March 15, 2005. But we weren't done with debt yet. Oh no ladies and gentlemen, we were about to get neck deep into it over the course of 2005.
Tune in next Monday for more of our debt remaining report!
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