The debt snowball…. is a life changer and a life saver. After the class on Dumping Debt we added up all of our debt and it was $111,571. What the heck are we supposed to do with that? Seriously. Feelings of fear, hopelessness, sadness and disappointment washed over me. How did we get to this point? Outside of student loans why did we rack up so much debt? We confronted the debt, accepted that a change needed to happen in our lives and saw what it would take to make that change.
FIRST – how did we get here? Student loans and credit cards. Why so much in student loans? I look back and remember my mom paying for me to go through college and my brother started three years after me and I didn’t want her paying for both of us so I told her to worry about my brother and I’d fend for myself. I took out student loans in my 4th year of school, right after I changed my major. I was dumb. I took out more than I needed to get the extra cash – for what? I didn’t need it, I just wanted it. Mr. HutchLife took out loans during undergrad and he was conservative, because he’s always been wise, taking out only what he needed and working on campus. Being the wise one, we only took out what was needed for tuition and fees for his time in the seminary, after taking more than we needed during his first summer session.
SECOND – how will we tackle this? The debt snowball. The lifesaver for us. Line up all our debts from smallest to largest, REGARDLESS of interest rate and just tackle it. To some it sounds crazy to disregard the interest rate, but the small wins when you start keep you motivated to continue on. Paying off debt isn’t about the money, it’s about changing your mindset and building habits that will stick. We prayed for guidance on this because we were still on one income and we knew when Mr. HutchLife walked across the stage for his diploma his grad school loans would hit immediately and we had to pay it all back. We didn’t know how that was going to work with the income we had.
THIRD – communication. We talked and talked and talked about our desire to be debt free and how this debt snowball would get us there. We understood it was emotional and sharing some of the things that frustrated us and being open and honest drew us closer to one another and deepened our love for each other. We talked about what we would do when we were debt free. We started to truly dream together about life on the other side.
Life on the other side of debt. What would that look like for you? What would you do if you had no debt?
