*It's important to note that The Husband and I have dated since high school so we accumulated our debt together. Our debt is not a case of he brought/she brought merging finances.
The Husband and I both graduated college debt free, which was awesome. He worked at a (crappy) job that offered tuition reimbursement and I received a full athletic scholarship. Where we really got into trouble was with credit card debt. Both of us signed up for our first credit card in college. I still remember that I got to choose from seven different designs. (I chose the lime green one with water drops in case you're interested.) Between the two of us for a long time our credit card debt hovered around $7000 which was manageable, not good, but manageable. Then we bought a house at the absolute peak of the California housing market. At the time, we had an almost one year old and I was pregnant again. I was only working 20 hours a week so I could be home most of the time raising our son, and then later our daughter.
We had all these new housing related bills to pay: mortgage, utilities, cable, internet, etc. and I cut my working hours in half, but we never adjusted our lifestyle. We continued to live our life exactly as we had when we had two full-time incomes and fewer bills. We made up for the shortfall with our credit cards. Big mistake! Huge! There were times we had to charge groceries on our credit card because we literally had NO MONEY to pay for them. We charged gas and everyday living expenses. It was no way to live.
After a couple years of this idiocy plan we found ourselves in credit card debt to the tune of $26000. The worst part about this is we had nothing to show for it. We were using our credit cards to pay for our living expenses. At one point, we had saved up the cash to attend a wedding across the country and had a difficult time with our hotel because even though we were paying cash when we checked out, they needed a credit card to put a "hold on" for any incidentals we might have incurred and because our cards were maxed out we didn't have a card to use. Finally we had to use our debit card which was scary because all the money in our account was earmarked for something and I was afraid a bill would come through and because of the hold on our card, a check would bounce.
We were drowning and barely able to make minimum payments, but we still didn't change our lifestyle. I can't tell you what we were thinking because I still don't know. We continued living a life we couldn't afford because we didn't want "people" to know how bad our financial situation was. I think we were so worried about what other people would think of us that we dug our hole deeper and deeper regardless of the stress it was putting on us and our marriage.
I wish I could tell you that one day we woke up and made better, smarter choices and we dug ourselves out of debt one payment at a time, but for us that's not the case. Stay tuned for Part 2 of Our Debt Story.
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