I was getting out of debt!

So there I was..  it was 2005, I was working as an xray tech in a town over an hour away, and I was miserable.  T-totally miserable!!  I hated it.  Picture tiny hospital with one other co-worker in the xray department, your boss.  And your boss was THE most self-centered person I have ever met in my entire life.  I literally had to wait to see what kind of mood they were in to know what kind of day I was going to have.

But anyways, I was doing the normal American way, doing stuff on payments.  Mortgage, car payments, student loan payments, personal loan payments.  Go to work and hate it just to pay for stuff you can't enjoy cause you're too busy at work being miserable.  There's got to be a better way!!

Yeah, I admit it, it happened one day.  I was reading a magazine for radiology, and at the back were quotes.  Quotes from famous people, all of which I knew, except one.  Dave Ramsey.  Who?  So I looked it up right there at work.  And had an epiphany.

So I quit el miserable job-o.  And went fanatic about paying shit off.  It was my new mission in life.  Shit was gonna get paid off or I was gonna die trying!  Wanna know what?   I had a blast!  Over 18 months stuff was either sold or paid off the hard way, all $56,000 worth of it.  About a year of that was done on a single income, I might add.

I won't even tell you all of the insane things I did to save money.  A funny one, though, me and my daughter was just talking and laughing about the other day, that I will share.  My family likes to go out to eat.  Like, all the damn time.  It is like a past time.  And while I was paying off debt I did allow for some blow money in the budget each for things like that, it made it all work so much better.  So as it happened one day, my family wanted to go out to eat, as usual, and I was low on my blow money.  So me and my daughter decided to fill up on left over Hamburger Helper before we went, and we sat in the restaurant with them and had tea and munched on the chips and salsa.  You would have thought we created some grievous sin.  Like, OMG, we aren't going to die because we didn't eat a freaking enchilada.  Gees!  They kept trying to buy our lunch but we were full already and quite content.  They couldn't conceive of the idea.  It was funny to us.

I bought a $1,000 car from an auto auction to drive, and put the one with the $23,000 price tag up for sale.  It wasn't worth that, of course, after all the rolling into the new loan trading up crap I have fallen prey to time and time again.  What can I say, I did stupid things.

I went to see Dave Ramsey live, twice.  It was very motivational.  I read everything I could get my hands on about saving money.  I have a list somewhere, haha, it's pretty impressive.  A lot of them I read more than once.  And yes, we even screamed on Dave Ramsey's live show "We're Debt Free!!". 

I hate payments.  I am now where I don't even like house payments.  A roof over your head just shouldn't cost so darned much, ugh!   I read an interesting article once about the mortgage myth, there's a lot of wisdom in it, even if it is written tongue-in-cheekish.   This is a link to jlcollinsnh's article on his website, read here.  

Right now I have no debt and I feel very free.   Debt sucks.

 

 

 

#Stories  #DebtFree