Like most Americans, I’m having an issue with debt.\u00a0 I’ve been in this place before, where my credit cards have become a burden, and the fees become more than just a little nuisance.\u00a0 The last time this happened I took a loan against my life insurance and was able to pay off the higher-rate cards to the point where my overall CC debt was only a few thousand dollars.\u00a0 Which I figured to be manageable.\u00a0 Or so I thought.<\/p>\n
What seems to happen when you have less debt is; that you start thinking you have more money to play with, which isn’t really the case.\u00a0 What you have is a pot of borrowed credit and the mistaken impression that it’s yours to do with what you wish.\u00a0 And you can pay it back over the long term. Which\u00a0IS<\/em><\/strong> true, but you’re going to end up paying a lot more over the long term, much more than the initial balance.\u00a0 So you start looking at ways to repay it that aren’t going to take 5 years or more.\u00a0 And the cycle begins anew.<\/p>\n Sure you can try the Ramsey ‘Baby Steps’ program, but unless you’re able to stop using the cards completely, you’re playing against the house, with the house’s money.\u00a0 Right now, I’m employing the ‘Rob Peter to pay Paul’ method, which has 2 outcomes.\u00a0 Success or failure.\u00a0 And if my debt balloons again while I’m paying off the loan from my insurance, then I’m probably going to be lightly screwed.\u00a0 But it’s up to me to make it work.\u00a0 And I’ll be keeping a close eye on the issue this time.<\/p>\n We’ll see how it goes.\u00a0 There will be updates.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like most Americans, I’m having an issue with debt.\u00a0 I’ve been in this place before, where my credit cards have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,37],"tags":[100,101,99,98],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finances","category-play","tag-ccs","tag-credithell","tag-debt","tag-finances"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}