Debt Free? What comes next?

As my debt free date grows closer, I find myself thinking about the next step. I’m about 6 months away and it’s an incredibly strange feeling. I have had some sort of debt since I bought my first car at 16. I’ve spent half my life paying someone back.

When my debt is reduced to only my mortgage payment, what will I do?!?

If you had asked me, when I first started this journey, what I would do when my debts were paid, I would have said, “I want to remodel my 50 year old kitchen” or “I want to restucco my home!”

The fantasy has changed.

My fantasy now consists of a paid off mortgage and growing mutual funds.

I can’t tell you how strange it was to sit down to deliberate over the next step. Obviously we are going to save a larger emergency fund and aggressively pay our second mortgage but my dreams of ‘big shiny things’ are fewer and farther between. OK, I’ll just spit it out…

I’m an addict.

I’m addicted to the good feeling I get when I see zero balances.

Have you thought about your life after debt? What are your plans (other than investments and mortgage payoffs)?

Life After Credit Card Debt – Ups and Downs

Hello everyone! It’s Tricia here with an update. I know some of you have been wondering how things have been going for my family. Now that Beks has basically paid off her debt, it is the perfect time for an update. Next month we get to meet the next blogger. I don’t know about you, but I am very excited!

First things first…are we still credit card debt free? It pains me to say this. Unfortunately, no. I could easily lie and say we don’t have any credit card debt but that wouldn’t be right. It will be paid off next month, but it’s still there. I can log into our account online right now and see a balance on our card that we can’t pay off. It hurts and I’m embarrassed to have an update with this news. We were doing fine, then I made a big mistake.

We decided that we were going to go on our first ever family vacation. I planned everything down to what we were going to be doing at 8:00PM on Friday night. All costs were carefully calculated on a spreadsheet and we saved up the money to cover our trip. My husband commented that maybe I should be a travel planner. I was pretty proud of myself until we got home. We overspent. I knew we overspent by a few hundred dollars because a week or so before our trip I added a show to our agenda. But the damage was more than that. All the little things added up. Trust me, I will not be pursuing a career as a travel planner anytime soon.

On the bright side, we had a fantastic time during our vacation. We made a scrapbook for our trip (the material for that was another expense I didn’t consider) that I look at a few times a week. It brings so much joy to my heart. Our life was becoming routine the shake-up that a vacation provides rejuvenated all of us. It will be the event in our lives that we will always talk about. No matter what, we’ll always have that experience.

Getting into credit card debt again shouldn’t have happened. We should have waited a while longer before going on vacation and saved up more money. I could have saved 50% on our tickets to the show but I wanted to be close to the action and paid the higher price. There were a lot of could haves and should haves to go around. The bottom line is that we didn’t immediately pay off what we spent so we had credit card debt again. At least next month it will be paid off. While I would love to go on a vacation again, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Next time we’re going to save up way more than we think we will spend so this doesn’t happen again.