I was like most Americans. Yes I admit it I lived paycheck to paycheck paying my bills and putting just a little excess on my credit cards. "I'll pay it back" I would say. "It's only a few dollars." Over time a few dollars dollars grew to a hundred then 200 then 500 then 1000 until one day in the fall of 2013 after successfully maxing out 7 of my 8 credit cards I was in trouble. For the first time I went 30 days past my due date on my home loan. We could not pay the minimum on our largest credit card. We were barely skimping by. At 18000 dollars credit card plus 4000 car loan and a few thousand in medical, I was ready to throw in the towel. I was ready to claim bankruptcy and I was researching on how to do that. Thankfully and unthankfully HUD rescued me. It came with a price. Although they did reduce my mortgage payment the program destroyed my credit. My credit rating went from 750 to 550 in a matter of months. Desperation set in the next year when my cars transmission went out. I fought hard to work and fix my car. We tried twice to get a loan. Once we almost succeeded. Finally the banks said no and my family and I were on our own.
Fast forward a year my cars fixed our income is up my credit cards are down and I haven't been saying the phrase we can't afford that so much anymore. We still have a few financial set backs but have been able to stay ahead by watching our spending habits and putting off bigger purchases until we can afford them.
A couple months ago as I was reviewing my family's national debt (what I call the all the debts we owe) I noticed that since I wrote about it back in the spring we had only paid off around 400 dollars. After all the mortgage payments the credit card payments all the dr payments the 401k and the car payments we had only paid 400 dollars!? Now my wife is pregnant and is the blame of a big portion of that plus my dr bills from my surgery have been surfacing but still only 400 dollars after all that work? This is when I started wondering how I could make a bigger punch to my national debt how can I Pay off my credit cards faster. Is it possible to pay just Princable and no interest? As I thought about this I remember a time back in 2014 after my injury we left to Arizona. We had to keep careful eye on our finances and I realized that at times we had enough to pay off our entire balance so I would. By doing that I wouldn't pay interest and my 300 dollar payment would turn into 500 credit dollars. I thought at the time as long as I did that every month I wouldn't be paying interest and my credit card would slowly pay itself off. I was wrong it only lasted 2 months and I was farther in debt back to paying the minimum payment. As I thought about that I wondered what went wrong. I stayed up late drenched in thoughts of how can I Pay off my credit cards faster how can I stop paying interest and make my payments more powerful in knocking out a few credit cards. I have finally been able to at least figure a few solutions and in doing so have paid off one credit card and just over 600 dollars on credit card debt saving around 60 dollars in interest in just under 2 months. 3 of my credit cards during this time have stopped charging me interest and in about 2 months I am projecting that I will have another credit card paid off and another one with no interest. I have been able to start my debt snowball at nearly it's full strength knocking out just over 300 dollars at one credit card per month. That is what I am going to try to teach. I get nothing in return for this just the satisfaction of passing on some valuable information to those who could use it and being able to pay themselves and not the finance companies is satisfaction enough for me.
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