Where We Are

This little family is so far in debt it's not even funny. Granted, I did make the decision to be a stay-at-home mom in our absolute WORST financial state EVER (personally and nationally). This decision is, of course, not as crazy as it sounds. The Bee will be our only biological baby for reasons outside our control and to miss my only chance at this would be a sin in of itself. Nevertheless, the joy that little girl puts in our life seems to be overshadowed sometimes by those flashing numbers above our heads: $23,021.12 in credit card debt! $3500 and counting in medical bills! A mortgage we can barely pay because of our other debt! Student loans racking up!
The student loans make an easy and dreadable deadline for CREDIT CARD PAYOFF. We have until mid-2011 to pay it all off so we can afford to start paying on the loans. BLAH! Ya know, before I had a medical emergency without health insurance (a sin punishable by death in a lot of cases) we never had a lick of debt. At all. Ah, but one surgery and a week in the hospital later there we were. I got fired and we signed the papers on our mortgage. Then I got pregnant. Yup, swipe here swipe there, pay that bill off with another swipe, figure we'll pay it off later swipe swipe swipe and here we sit in a big fat hole. Then it became worse and worse as I went through postpartum depression and well, we just kept buying STUFF. When the money would run out, we'd fill in the gaps with credit cards. I don't even want to think about how many grocery trips and diapers I'm paying off now. Stuff that's been eaten, thrown away and it's still not paid for. Not to mention furniture that's falling apart and trips that are mere memories in a scrapbook - not paid for. Not the trip OR the scrapbook.
But! So far in 2009, except for 2 occasions where I left my debit card in my back pocket after buying gas (a bad habit of mine) and one occasion where I could only get the sale if I used my card, we haven't used a credit card for anything. The 2 "oops" moments were paid for out of the account immediately and the sale charge was only 69 cents and was for six items of clothing one of which I returned making my purchases totally free!
My moment came in January during Oprah's Best Life week. (sidenote* stay-at-home moms are pretty much drawn to Oprah for no apparent reason. It just is...) The show came on on a Thursday and I recorded it and watched it over the weekend. (Our DVR is free thanks to some programming mistakes that DirecTV made and I made Billy sit on the phone with customer service until they compenstated us fully ^_^) Anyway, Suze Orman was on and she asked the viewers to make a pledge to not spend for a day, not use credit cards for a week, and not eat out for a month. Well, I started on a Sunday and it took nothing not to spend that day. Then we stopped using credit cards. And then we never starting using them again. Now here it is, the end of March and we've made leaps in paying off our debt. Granted we've had quite a bit of extra income. We sold a car, Billy got his cost of living grant from school (which I should probably flip over to paying off his loan but there's more pressing debts at hand), and we got our first tax refund as parents. Now, we get to see how well we can do it on Billy's income alone.
My goal is to get under $20000 in debt by 25. That gives me four months to pay off just over $3000. I'm crossing my fingers that I qualify for unemployment so we can put aside a little emergency cash, get Hubby's car fixed, and throw the rest at debt. The only for sure lump of cash I know is coming is the "extra" paycheck in May. I have to talk with Billy about if he wants to charge any rent to Kevin who is currently our Roomie. We're not charging him anything now as he doesn't have a job and he helped us like crazy when we first got out on our own. He's a huge help around the house and it doesn't seem to be costing us too much more for him to be living here. But if Billy is OK with charging him a little, we can have that too. Also, I want to have a garage sale and all of that will go to debt. So we'll see.