Back in 2011, I worked for a company that required continuing education as part of their employment. The cool thing was they provided the classes and some of them were awesome.
I think I’ve talked about this before on the blog, but I can’t recall. I took the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University. It was a huge wake up call for me. I discovered, at the time, I was spending approximately $750 a month on credit card minimums. It was a shock.
I was determined to get myself out of debt. I did so great for so long. I was paying off credit cards and starting to feel so much better financially.
And then life happened and I fell off the wagon.
And then I decided to launch a new book and invested a lot of money I didn’t have. Since I didn’t have a good idea of how to launch a book, that failed miserably.
I suddenly found myself in debt again.
The thing about that is, though, you can’t let it get you down. Being depressed about credit card bills doesn’t get them paid off. And I was for a couple of months as I paid minimums because I was scraping together a large sum money for something else I needed. I was essentially right back where I started and it was no fun.
Life is hard. It sucks. Being an adult sucks even more but I did it to myself and I had no one else to blame. I couldn’t blame lack of book sales or anything else. It was all me. I hated myself for a long time because of it.
But then I sucked it up and started making goals to pay them off. Things happened in such a way that allowed me to pay off two major balances with a comma in a short amount of time. It’s hard when you see large sums of cash depart the bank account. I had nothing to show for those balances. Oh, I had a published book that was getting pretty good reviews, so perhaps the editing was worth it. And cover art is always worth the money, in my opinion. But everything else? Nope.
But the relief of having those balances completely wiped out was palpable. I’m starting to see a pinprick of light at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. It’s a long, painful process. It never happens fast enough for my liking. If I could wave a magic wand and make them disappear forever with no penalties, I would.
The day I have those cards paid off, I intend to dance a little jig and sing a merry dance. I look forward to having a zero balance on all of them.
