Hey, Everyone! This is a follow up post to our August Budget here. I said I would explain why there was a credit card bill in our budget so here it is!
We have one credit card (simply never canceled it when we paid it off when we got out of debt) and it hasn’t had a balance in years. We cut our credit cards up and vowed to never use them. We never canceled the account and when the cards we had cut up expired, they sent us new ones. We debated what to do and thought about not activating them. At the time though, my husband was getting ready to travel internationally and we decided to activate them so he could take the card overseas in case he needed to use a card for something. He took cash for all his expenditures otherwise. He did indeed need to use it as one restaurant did not take cash at all. He came home with a total of about $12 on the card and we paid it off when the bill came and that was that. We kept the cards in a file in our file cabinet and didn’t carry them with us and never used them.
If you have pieced together our story from my instagram over the last year, you know that we moved in 2017 so that my husband could run his own business which has been his dream. That’s a whole other story for a different time and place, but in a nutshell we ended up living on $18,300 for a year as a family of 5 (we had our 3rd baby that year) and we completely drained our savings. We bought a fixer upper house when we moved here and sank a good amount of money into purchasing it and then fixing it up. By the end of the year, we were completely out of money. Living on so little money plus having lots of things come up that had to be taken care of was a recipe for disaster. It was only a matter of time. I knew it. That’s the worst feeling. When you know how to budget, how to put away for emergencies, how to handle money, but there simply isn’t the money for more than just survival. It was a very scary time for me because I could see us speeding towards disaster and there was nothing I could do about it. No matter how much I scrimped and saved, it simply wasn’t enough. And then it happened. Disaster struck.
Our brakes on our vehicle locked up and the break pads and break lines melted. We had no choice but to get it repaired. With our savings completely exhausted and no money, I pulled our credit card out of the file cabinet and used it to fix our van. It ended up needing a lot more work than just the breaks and turned out being close to a couple thousand dollars. During this time, we had closed down the business we were in and had taken a temporary job contract on the Carolina Coast over the winter. When that contract ended, we came home but had no job. My husband had been putting in applications for weeks before coming back and had a few interviews lined up. It ended up being two months before he started a job and we had to live on our credit card for those two months. Thankfully our expenses are really low and we can live off very little money, but it still added up. So that leaves us at today. We are putting as much into savings as we can and my husband is taking on side jobs to earn extra money. We hope to have it paid off really soon and not ever be in this situation again!
That’s the good, the bad and the ugly of our credit card situation!
Until next time …
Grace