Out of the Red

The first step in getting out of debt is living within your means. We won’t do ourselves any good working out budgets, clipping coupons, or cutting out Starbucks if at the end of the day we still spend more than we have.

It seems like a basic principle, but in these times it seems to come up much more often than it should. For my husband and me, we’re barely making ends meet. That means if an unexpected expense arises, we often have a hard time finding a way to pay for it.

This very problem is how our credit card debt has snowballed into the current abominable snowman. Things like… “let’s put some of these Christmas gifts on the credit card and we’ll pay it off in January.” Then in January the triple-the-usual gas bill comes. Or, “we deserve a vacation, we’ll just put a couple of nights at a hotel on the card and work it off in the next month”, but in the next month the car needs new tires. There’s always something. Always. It’s emotionally and financially exhausting.

What’s even scarier for me is when those credit card purchases aren’t luxuries, but necessities. Over the past year there have been more than a couple of occasions where after the bills there wasn’t enough left even for groceries. First the difference came from savings, then there was no place else to go but to the credit card.

So the plan is no more credit cards. And we mean it this time. If we don’t have enough money to go out to eat, we stay in. If we don’t have enough for groceries, we bust out the ramen noodles and dig out the old cans of tuna from the back of the cupboard. If we want to do something special, we work extra to save up ahead of time. It’s way more fun to work towards something than to have to pay it off after the fun is over.

Today begins a new credit card as back-up free era!