2019 has already proven to be the most stressful, gut-wrenching, slap-to-the-face wake up call that we could have ever received, but by the end of this year it also has the potential to be one of the most fulfilling and personally rewarding ones we ever lived through.

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If you’ve been following this blog for any period of time, you know my situation. If not, here is a very brief recap:

At the start of 2019, my wife and I came to full terms with our debt and the stinky butthole of a situation we had gotten ourselves into. We sat down and added everything together and found that we had $126,310.77 worth of combined credit card and student loan debt.

On top of this, we were paying out close to $3600 a month more in bills than we were bringing in from income. We had absolutely zero in savings, and we were very much at risk of losing our home that we had just purchased in June of 2018.

Since then we have been scrambling to stay afloat, at times barely even eating to save money. We have taken side jobs such as my wife’s now steady gig caring for dogs via Rover.com, and targeted our debt with every ounce of energy we have.

Today I wrote checks for $23,347.12, $1,660.84, and $2763.12 to pay off and close 3 more accounts.

It was a very good day.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the graphic on the right, here it is in it’s most updated form:

The devil is in the details though, so keep reading to see exactly how the numbers break down…

What this graphic illustrates is a complete and total effort on the part of my wife and me to get out of debt once and for all. I’ll go into full details at a later date, but in no way, shape, or form are we slowing down.

What I will do is provide a bit more clarity into the graphic above. For a long time it just read “Credit Card Debt Tracker,” but I realized that was a bit misleading, since it actually represented our credit card debt as well as my student loan debt. So if we break it down like that, and keep them separate, then my details look like this:

Credit Cards:
At the start of 2019: $85,022.39
As of 09.13.19: $38,273.57

Student Loans:
At the start of 2019: $41,288.38
As of 09.13.19: $40,623.87

So you can see most of our effort has been directed towards actual credit card debt, especially when it comes to our high-interest accounts.

I know the numbers might seem lame on the student loan side of things, but our interest rate is ridiculously low on those loans (under 4%), and at the same time we are in the process of pursuing the Borrower Defense option through the United States government, due to my former school’s less-than-stellar history. Click the link to read my previous post, and for full details on that sucker.

Regardless of how the numbers break out though, we are very much on track to hit our goal of $50,000 in debt paid off by the end of the year! We have also accumulated a small nest egg of savings, and are well on our way to having the emergency savings fund we should have had a LONG time ago.

In past years, that $50,000 would have been wasted on dumb things and we would have blissfully plodded along, accruing more debt, and acting like idiots. We now have our path to Financial Independence squarely in front of us, and I truly believe we will reach our goals.

2019 has already proven to be the most stressful, gut-wrenching, slap-to-the-face wake up call that we could have ever received, but by the end of this year it also has the potential to be one of the most fulfilling and personally rewarding ones we ever lived through.

Have a great weekend, and KEEP DIGGING!

Leave me a comment below and let me know how things are going for you on your own path to Financial Freedom!