Holy jumpin'! I had no idea, and now I'm depressed.
I'm spending, no word of a lie, a hair over $300 a month in interest charges right now on two credit cards and a line of credit. Man that's funk-inducing (and not the good kind of George Clinton funk, or even the odourous, well worn basketball sneaker kind of funk, but rather the sad-sack mopey Charley Brown kinda funk). That's $300 of good and hard earned money I'm shelling out, money that's mine and will never be seen again by me. You tally up how long that's been going on (I'm not going to for fear of how pathetic it will indeed be) and wow... yeah...
Once I get all this debt paid off, well, suddenly I'll have $300 a month to do as I please with. Of course it's going to go into the house fund but it will be indeed a happy day when the last of those three credit lines are bare.
Of course, I do have an impulse control problem, in that I'll buy things without thinking of the ramifications (same with my food gorging mentioned in the previous post) and now, I'm beginning to see that I've been paying for this ungodly habit for years. I had earlier this year done the math, and yeah, I've effectively paid 100% of the money I've borrowed in interest. That's a whale bone shiv in the gut for sure.
I got a second credit card a couple of years ago, figuring that earning points on my credit spending would be good for me, and that I could put away my Visa and not use it for anything and just pay it down and I'd be able to reduce my debt. Well, for a while it worked, and then I wound up using both cards, digging my hole deeper, and now, I'm at a point where any headway I've made on paying down my original Visa and line of credit has basically been off-set by the MasterCard. How fucking silly.
I've tallied up my monies, and if I subtract my rent from my earnings and use all of what remains to pay off my debt it will take a little over ten months to kill it. That's completely unreasonable, but it allows me to understand the target. Buy Nothing Year will be awesome for me in paying down my debt, but a one-year plan isn't going to cut it, even if I'm not buying comics and cds and the rest, I'll still have other expenses (food, clothing, etc) which will impact it. Reasonably, if I can cut my debt down to just my line of credit I'll be paying a third the interest. The way to do that, well, pay off a lump sum on the line of credit (to meet the payment) and then use the line of credit to pay off the credit cards, that way it's lower interest rate is absorbing the higher ones (learned that from the various debt management shows on "W" Network and Slice like Maxed Out and Til Debt Do Us Part). It's a tricky thing to do but I think I can manage it. I guess I don't have much of a choice.
I've gotten to the point now where I've even filled out an application to be on one of the above mentioned shows, if only to have the professional advice. Adrienne's looking it over and we'll decide together whether airing our finances publicly (like I'm not doing that already) is something we want to do. We're probably not in dire enough a situation to get on a show like that, but you never know...