Climbing Out One Family’s Adventure in Becoming Debt-free

This week our lives jumped the tracks.  At 37 years-old I raised my eyes and found my family sitting at the bottom of a hole that I helped dig.

And it’s a deep hole.  $47,683 deep.

Now hand-in-hand, our stomachs in knots, The Wife and I are standing up and trying to climb out of this thing.

How in the world did we get here, you may ask.  Well, “here” is actually a pretty normal state of affairs in suburbia.  Most of our friends and family carry debt, use credit cards, have car payments and are upside-down in their homes.  No one is anywhere near paying off their mortgage(s).

As it was for many, 2008 was rough on us, but if I’m to be totally honest with you (as I promise to be with this blog – it’s why we won’t bother with real names) we started digging our hole years ago.  2008 just brought our precarious house of cards crashing down with a few hits in a row.

So who are we and how did we get here?  Read on.  Maybe we aren’t so different from you.

I work two jobs, one full-time for 15 years, one part-time for 7 years.  The Wife has her own business and regularly brought home a good paycheck too.  We bought our first house ten years ago and sold it to “upgrade” in 2005.  The new mortgage was double our old one, but still only 30% of our income.

So far so good, right?

Business began dropping off at The Wife’s business in 2006.  At first it was just a bit less “fun” money, so we charged a few more things on credit and barely noticed.  Her landlord then raised the lease not once, not twice, but three times in one year.  The Wife’s was not the only business to move or just close up that year.  We blindly borrowed and charged to keep the doors open and to make payroll.

In July of 2008 The Wife suffered a mishap at home and was out of commission for three months.  Being the amazing trooper she is, she fully recovered, but the finances were now in a tailspin.  Although my job provides decent insurance, the medical bills continue to arrive six months later.

In October the part-time job I’d been at for seven years laid me off.  The last check didn’t arrive until two weeks past its expected time and the volley of bounced checks was staggering.  For the first time in our ten-year marriage we were behind on payments and quickly falling farther.

Christmas was a blur and we emerged from it to start 2009 in a financial state that was no longer tenable. I think I knew we were going to lose the house and had to do something, but it was a pretty vague notion and our debts crested $46,000.

So what do we do?  A couple in our late-thirties with two kids under 5, declining income and staggering debt.

We are so far behind we are ready to take any drastic measures that are grounded in reality.

I do not know if we are going to make it, but we are committed to not living the way we have so far.

Come with us on the journey.

the Dad