Sunday, March 14, 2010

Credit cards, be gone!

Without burying the lead, our little family had a big milestone this week: We paid off all our credit cards!
Hans has always had one credit card that he used for tuition, textbooks, and other incidentals. Until this past year, I've never had a credit card. I opened one "for incidentals" and ended up putting more on it than I wanted. Yuck. We also had a Best Buy credit card for our pretty washer and dryer, and a Roomstore credit card for our couch. It was nothing over the top, but I hated worrying about which payment was due when and having to pay interest. It just felt like something hanging over our heads.

Thanks to Uncle Sam, we received a slightly larger-than-expected tax return. We debated what to do with it - put it toward my car payments, save it for a house.  We decided we'd be best off getting rid of our credit cards. So we paid of each of them this weekend and cut up the cards! No more credit cards! Yay!

We're not totally out of debt yet. Hans' parents helped us out by putting some of our honeymoon expenses on one of their interest-free credit cards. We hope to have that paid off by this summer and we'll be debt free! (I'm not counting student loan debt and our car loan - I consider those "good" debt, unlike "bad" credit card debt). We've already set up a savings account and started saving for a house. It's really exciting and I can't wait til we have a place of our own!

1 comment:

  1. Good for ya'll!! That is so wonderful. Debt truly is binding. Way to go and thank heavens for tax returns--we just got ours and are using it for baby stuff (which we couldn't fit in our budget otherwise).

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