Many of us, when looking at the debt we have, feel despair: How is it possible to pay down so much debt? When my husband and I were first married, I had credit card debt, and it didn’t take long for him to get into the spirit of using credit cards, since we were poor students without jobs.
A couple years later, we were staring at the bills and wondering how we ended up with so much credit card debt. We had income by then, but it wasn’t much. We were already so careful about our spending! How could we cut back even more? How could we find the money to pay down debt?
The cold, hard truth, of course, was that we really weren’t being careful with our spending. I had an “ah-ha” moment when I read a book my mother gave me, Debt Free on Any Income. The book suggested that studies show that the average household wastes between 10% and 15% of its monthly income. After taking another, more honest, look at our finances, it became clear that there was still plenty of room in our budget.
All we had to do was find the waste and apply it to our debts. [Read more…] about Find the Money to Pay Down Debt
