A Couple Years of Stupidity

In the following couple of years after the purchase of my Suburban it seemed like all good sense and any notion of the previous attempt to get out of debt went the way of the dodo. Although not all of it was irresponsible spending and some of the debts incurred were out of necessity, almost all of it could have been avoided had I have continued the original debt snowball and not blown it back out of proportion with the school loan and the truck but as they say hindsight is always 20/20.

One of the first major debts to hit us after the purchase of the truck was the heater in the house going out in the middle of winter. With a newborn and a toddler in the house there was not much we could do but get it fixed immediately, leading to a %10 interest signature loan in the amount of $5k for a new heater. This brought us to around $155k in our debt snowball (which we were totally ignoring at this point), within 6-8 months of  having to put the heater in, the ac pump on my truck went out, another have to fix issue. This time it was only $1600 but yet again we had no emergency fund built up to fall back on so into the bank we went again and tacked it onto the revolving signature loan they had given us. And during all of this instead of trying to get back on track  and get things aligned in our favor what did we continue to do, nothing. We kept with the convenience of eating out near to every night since with both of us working we were to tired to come in and fix dinner (or so that was our excuse).

Within 3-4  months of having the ac repaired on the truck the transmission started showing signs of slipping, since I was already running on a paycheck to paycheck basis I decided to just ignore the signs that the truck was giving me and I drove the truck until the transmission went totally out on the truck with only 1 speed working. At this point we were very lucky that my parents had an extra vehicle to lend us because the initial repair estimate on the truck this time $2800 and at this point we were all but tapped out. By this time we should not have had too many problems because both of us had moved to a really good job and had more money coming in than we had ever had before. And this was the breaking point we needed to restart our debt snowball and to get back on track. The realization that we were so far behind was like a smack in the face to us because there was no real reason for it other than our own laziness.

At this point we made the decision to make a written plan to get back on track, and we decided to look for a little help getting motivated to succeed. Through my wife's church we found that they were doing  Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University class and it was something we felt could really help us.

Next up: Getting Organized and making a plan.