It’s so easy to say “cut back, spend less” but so hard to
do.
In addition to wanting to pay off debt, we want to live our
life.
Admittedly, if we stopped doing anything fun or ever having
treats, we would get out of debt faster… but what kind of life would we live?
So many financial blogs talk about buying second hand or paying off their house
in 5 years, or getting debt free in just 9 months, etc. I feel like so many of
these are unrealistic examples. Where we live, in the central valley of
California, we have very few second hand stores and even fewer that ever have
anything worthwhile. Also, the cost of living and house prices are
astronomical! According to a recent article, in order to buy a house in San
Jose or San Francisco (each pretty easily accessible from where we live) the
average median income needed was $213,000/per year, for a monthly mortgage of
over $6000 a month. With monthly mortgages that high, there is no way we can
pay our house off in 5 years. People/bloggers who do that don’t live in
California or near the Bay Area; those are always people in the South or
Mid-West. And don’t get me wrong, that is awesome for them, but not realistic
where we live. Even people who get out of debt in 9 months don’t have the
amount of debt or obligations we have.
I don’t want to come off like I’m whining or complaining or
even trying to say it’s not our own fault because we absolutely dug this hole
for ourselves; but we are also trying to dig ourselves out too. And it’s our fault,
not the fault of our children so we don’t think they should suffer when it was
our doing. Just because we got ourselves into debt doesn’t mean The Boy
shouldn’t be able to play football and The Girl shouldn’t be able to dance, or
they shouldn’t be able to go to birthday parties they are invited to or get new
clothes for the first day of school, or have a new game or toy, or, or, or… The
Kids shouldn’t pay for our mistakes.
Having said that, I don’t want my kids to come off sounding
spoiled because they do hear the word “no”. They do have chores. They do hear
“we can’t afford that right now”. They do hear “we have to save up for it”. And
they do hear “if you want it so badly, buy it for yourself”. But we do provide
all needs for our children and we try to provide experiences for them. We go
places and we do things as a family: zoos, hiking, vacations, etc.
For us, that is where getting out of debt gets difficult;
where getting out of debt, frugality, and life meet.
For that last few weeks (I know it’s not been a super long
time) we have been doing better. We haven’t been perfect, but we have been
making improvements.
Our debt is the highest it has been in 7 years and that is
depressing! But hopefully it is the highest it will ever be and we will start making
progress while still living life. We are hoping to have a very frugal No-Spend
September with some plans to do some fun, but inexpensive, family time. We plan
to go to a couple of national parks, some hiking, and a few day trips, but all
of it should be done pretty frugally.
We want to get out of debt but we also want to live our
lives and make memories with The Kids.
Wish us luck… We are going to decrease our debt
next month but we are also going to make some family memories in the process!
We will keep searching for the happy medium where getting out of debt meets
life!
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