Our Debt History

So in the Debt Update, I told of all of our debt.

I am interested in how scared people are to talk about their debt. Me putting it all out there helps me realized that it shouldn’t be scary. Yes we made mistakes, not they are not (thankfully) life threatening.

Anyway – debt history.

I’ll just go down in order of how I listed them on the page.

Target – we got sucked into the “if you sign up today, you can get 10% off!” As if 10% is really that big of a deal! But we did it anyway. And we owe them $400 now. We have only used that card the one time and when the actual card came in the mail, it was shredded.

The hubs’ student loan – self explanatory, he had to take a small loan for school. Actually, I am confused about this because he has been able to use the military programs to take his classes. I’ll have to ask him what this exactly paid for.

Capital One – we already had one credit card (the visa) and wanted one that would earn us points. Looking back on it, whew, what a dumb thought. So we got the card and used it on our drive across the country. We have almost 10K points – which means we have charged up and paid off $10K in less then a year. Now that’s an eye opener.

Visa – this is the hubs’ card, his first credit card ever. Decent interest rate (I believe it’s 9%, but I need to double check that). But now it’s almost maxed out.

Car – we got screwed on this minivan (yes, we are a minivan family). Screwed. The hubs has a car that he bought in 1999 (it’s been paid off for a couple of years) and when we went to get a second car, we did great on the price. Then a year later, we traded that car in for a minivan. And we got screwed on the price – a combo of having kids with us at the dealership, them keeping us there for 4 hours, the slimey salesman, the good salesman, and more. But it is a good van and we are happy with it and keeping it forever now.

My student loan – even though I worked (only part time and only three of my four semesters), I still took out close to the max student loans that I could. Student loans suck because they last for SO long, enter me being happy about the debt snowball!

House One – we bought this house before the boom, thus it is worth about $100K more then what we paid. Okay, $75K since we have that equity loan. Sweet! We plan on keeping this house for a long time as we may get stationed on the west coast again. And it is a good house, great neighborhood, great location, etc.

House Two – ugh. Our realtor was bad. I could talk a long time about this, I hope I can keep it short. We shopped for a house online. I looked at MLS, looked only at homes with many pictures and relied on our realtor. I looked for a few weeks before the hubs and I decided maybe we should buy new. That sent our realtor scrambling because of the deadlines, etc. We ended up buying a spec home that would be move in ready by the time we arrived in the south. Other then wanting three-four bedrooms, our main point was keep us close to the hubs’ job. That’s it. What did we get – a huge, beautiful, four bedroom, 2 1/2 bath, 2600 sq ft home. One way it takes the hubs 45 minutes to get to work. One way.

Needless to say, we don’t recommend our realtor. She doesn’t talk to us anymore either. And you know what they say – good business gets some publicity, bad gets you more. We tell people to avoid her, our experience was that bad. And we have been house poor for the past few months – it all just caught up to us.

We are relying on the bonus (by midnight tonight!) to pay off some bills (credit cards) and the pay raise and we will be able to breathe easier.

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