financiallybroken

How many people ask themselves everyday how they got in so much trouble with debt?  I wish I had a dime for every single one!  No, really, a dime for each and I wouldn’t have anymore debt.

For me, it started at 18 when I got my first job.  I wanted to start building my credit and I had a plan.  The plan was to get a small credit card, maybe a gas station or jewelery store card, put about a hundred dollars on it and pay it off over a few months.  So far, so good, I was going to build a credit history.  This worked well actually and soon enough the offers for the big 2 started rolling in.  I got one of each, a Mastercard and a Visa.  Then I started trading up.  I would get gold then trade to platinum, cancel the cards with high interest as I switched to ones with no interest for 6 months or a year.  I took over my fiances finances and started making sure he paid everything on time.  After a surprise baby boy, we started saving to buy a house.  I was 21 and he was 25.  We had no money handed to us for this but we were living rent free at the time with his parents.  I researched everything, got all the credit cards paid off and cancelled all but two, made sure his car was paid off, so we had no bills by the time we bought our home.  We got a 4 bedroom 2 bath home on 2 acres in the country for $73,000, at 7.75% interest for 30 years.  We paid $3,000 down on our FHA loan. The payments were $632 a month.  We couldn’t have been happier about having our very own home.  Did I mention that I totalled his car (the only running car we had at the time)  just a few days before closing.  Luckily, he had full coverage.  But now we each had a job and we had a child, and a house way out in the country and no car.  We didn’t get to move in for 2 months while the work was getting done on the car.  Instead we stayed with his parents and they drove us everywhere we needed to go.  When we did get to move in I was laid off.  (My lay offs usually come the same time every year so we were prepared for this.)  I went back to work in Oct. that year and we decided we wanted another baby.  Within a month I was pregnant.  Our oldest son was about 15 months old and we thought that the space between the kids was just right.  After a few months of working 12 hour shifts, being pregnant, carrying a toddler back and forth across town to his grandma while I worked and chauffeured my then live in boyfriend and father of my kids back and forth to work, which was 30 min. away, I decided we needed a second car.  During the 7th month of my pregnancy we bought a ‘97 Monte Carlo Z34.  It was used, 3 years old at the time, it had low miles and was beautiful.  It came complete with leather interior, CD, sunroof, and ground effects.  We paid $5,000 down and borrowed the rest.  It was $8,000 over 5 years at 7.5% interest.  The payments were a little over a hundred dollars a month.  Before we bought the car we acquired a few more credit cards and they all had a balance. Well, maybe, more than a few…  This was the begining of the end of my good credit days…. 

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