so, recently i managed to finally get myself out of credit card debt. about 7 years ago, i took on two major expenses — i bought a new 2001.5 Volkswagen Passat GLS sedan, and i bought my mother a house in rural texas. then about a year later, my personal circumstances dramatically changed and, suddenly, i no longer had piles upon piles of spending money. this did not stop me from spending money, especially since i had a new apartment with very little in the way of pots, pans, dishes, or bath towels in it. courtesy of ikea, bed bath and beyond, and the like, within a year, my credit cards, which i had always scrupulously paid off at the end of each month, had a scary balance. i was so broke, in fact, that despite the fact that i knew, within six months of moving in, that my new apartment was both (a) too big and (b) too expensive, i couldn’t afford to move because i didn’t have the money for a security deposit, much less movers. it took me another year of money manipulation to come up with that cash, and in that time, i wound up cashing out both my (small) Roth IRA and my (larger) 401(k) from a former employer, taking huge hits on early withdrawal penalties and also losing out on years worth of appreciation. six years later, i’m out of credit card debt and have only recently managed to save as much for retirement as i had back then. so, this is my story.

(retirement funds are going to be a recurring theme. you’ll see them again in this tale; i’m paranoid about retirement, not only because i (and every other Gen X’er on the planet) was raised being told that Social Security will be gone by the time i am retirement age, and the current political landscape doesn’t reassure me any on that front.)

so. broke, desperate to get out of my apartment, horrified at having cashed out my retirement savings — indeed my only savings — really, you’d think that at some point it would have occurred to me to cut up the credit cards. did it? oh, of course not. in fact, given my salary at that time, after paying for the car, the rent, the utilities, and the mortgage for mom’s house, sometimes the only way i was getting groceries was to put it on the mastercard. and not just groceries, because i also have the 80s hangup of “i deserve a treat,” which always, always entails buying something. i could barely pay the cable bill, but i had a fucking brilliant dvd collection.

finally though, my second lease on that apartment was up, and i could move. i found a great studio apartment in printer’s row — i’d wanted to live in printer’s row for ages — for $699/mo, with no security deposit except a pet deposit for the cats. i started packing and cleaning the old place, and — faced with the space differential between 3 bedrooms + lr, dr, etc., vs. a 650 sq ft studio — giving things away. at one point i filled one room with crap i wanted to get rid of, and posted a list to craigslist offering it all up for free. (of course i could have sold that stuff. but i didn’t want to deal with the hassles, and people who agree to buy something and then never show up, and in the end i wound up outfitting about 4 new college students’ new dorms or apartments, and i feel better about that than the $200 or whatever i could have made.) i had been for a while making glass mosaics, for an idle hobby — making candle holders, mostly, nothing great; i had probably $500 worth of equipment and supplies; i packed it all up, drove it to another timezone, and gave it all to a friend so she could play with it. this was the beginning of a trend for me, when i suddenly realized i didn’t actually need quite so much stuff as i had. now, i like getting rid of stuff. i still like getting new stuff, but i like getting rid of it and realizing i can see the top of my desk. i think finding that i could get by without so much goddamn crap around me — that i actively want less crap around me — was a huge step towards getting out of debt, if only because it slowed the digging myself further in.

in the new place, i found myself a little better off. first off, i could now pay rent + mortgage for less than a hundred bucks over what i’d previously been paying for rent alone. also, i didn’t sign up for cable. previously i had had digital cable, and it was $85 a month. $85/month! do you have any idea how much tv i watch? like 15-20 hours a month. this was completely ridiculous. i didn’t have to think twice about that one. but as for the rest of it, i was still not being one with the concept of not spending money. oh, i wanted to pay off the debt. i had a massive excel spreadsheet that told me exactly how long it would take to pay off my balances, and how much interest i would pay. i had a set amount of money that i would send to the credit cards each month, more than the minimums. but still, somehow, for some reason, i could not get it through my thick skull that I HAD TO STOP USING THE GODDAMN CARDS, no matter how awesome that cash back bonus lure was.

i did make progress, but what had initially started out as a three-year plan … stayed a three-year plan, for the most part. the problem was not that i was not sticking to my per-month budgeted payments. the problem was that i kept using them. my apartment building was sold, and the rumor through the complex was that it was going condo, and we would all be kicked out. i asked the new management about it, and not surprisingly, given how shitty they were, they lied. i didn’t believe them, though, so i started making preparations to move at the end of my second lease there. i had to leave the neighborhood, because that was the last rental complex in the area at that time. eventually they offered to sell us our units, but my mortgage payment would have been more than my rent, not including parking. i started charging moving supplies and groceries again, about three months before the move, in order to have cash on hand to write deposit checks and pay the movers. i had mostly stopped buying useless crap by that time — a 650 sq ft apartment will do that to you — but i increased my debt from something like $12k to more like $15k. i had also had no emergency fund to cover things, so when my car needed maintenance or something else cropped up, it went on the discover card.

i had at varying points throughout this time tried to find a second job, working for target or joann fabrics or someplace like that, but apparently i’m overqualified, or they didn’t believe me when i said i needed the cash. it’s probably for the best. all the places i applied, i would have felt obligated to put that employee discount to work.

finally i moved into the place where i am now, and although my rent was higher by about $40/mo, i no longer had to pay $125/mo for parking, so it was a net gain. still no cable, so there’s $100/mo i’m not spending. i had to pay gas bills once i was out of the high-rise complex, but i also didn’t have southern exposed windows causing me to run the a/c 24/7 from april until november just to keep the place below 80°F during the day. (the windows are, actually, probably the #1 reason i didn’t buy my apartment when they offered it to me. great place, but jesus, turn down the sun!) i had already been driving to hyde park daily to commute to work, so that didn’t change – the only substantive difference there was an additional 7 miles or so driving, which added slightly to the gas costs.

to avoid the dreaded “TL;DR”, please feel free to continue to part II if you are so inclined.