How Did We Get Here?

Sometimes, I look at our debt totals and I wonder “how in the world did we get here?”

I mean, not really. I know how we got ourselves in this situation: living beyond our means.

But, how, or more importantly, why, and most importantly, why didn’t we ever do anything about it?

We live in the Central Valley of California, near the Bay Area. The cost of living here is no joke. We make good salaries, but we drive old cars and don’t live extravagant lives. Yet here we are, mired in debt.

The Kids do participate in extra-curriculars. The Daughter dances and that is super expensive! (Like pay for her college when she stops dancing expensive!) The Boy plays a sport each season of high school: football, soccer, and baseball. We also like to do fun things as a family. We like to have the occasional meal out; we like nice things, but weirdly, we can never afford them!

We do budget “small” (I know that word is relative) amounts to our different budget categories each month, but there’s always too much month for the money to last. Each month, we designate as much money as we can to debt payment. And as it is, we only end up decreasing our balance by $500-700 per month.

I can’t wait to be out of this vicious cycle! Then we can allot more money to each envelope and put a little chunk towards savings each and every month.

I think the craziest thing about our debt is that we don’t live 1% lives. We don’t drive fancy cars. We don’t take expensive vacations. We don’t wear designer clothes. We live a “normal” upper-middle class life… which we couldn’t always afford.

When we sold our first house and moved into our current house, our mortgage nearly doubled. Not to mention that our electric/gas bill doubled too. We didn’t adjust our budget to meet those obligations, and we charged every shortfall on credit. Now, almost three years later, we are still paying for it. And will be for the foreseeable future. That’s how we got here. We were the Jones’s. We didn’t set out to be the Jones’s, but here we are nonetheless.

Now, we are digging our way out of debt. We owe thousands of dollars of debt because we financed a life we couldn’t afford. We didn’t live extravagantly, but we didn’t live within our means. We bought things we didn’t need with money we didn’t have. And now we are paying for it. Our situation is nobody’s fault but our own.

And we are working on it.

S.L.O.W.L.Y. Ever so slowly.

Our debt is going in the right direction: down. Our emergency fund is going in the right direction: up. And we are taking responsibility for the mess we made.

Wish us luck!