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The following post is by MPFJ staff writer Travis. Travis is a customer blogger for Care One Debt Relief Services, and also appears weekly at Enemy of Debt. Travis candidly shares his personal journey to pay off $109,000 of credit card debt and the tips he’s learned along the way. As a father and husband he provides a unique perspective on balancing debt, finances, and family.
A few years ago, I did a weight loss program with my wife in which we both lost a considerable amount of weight in a short amount of time.
I dropped 25 pounds in just six weeks, and was within 5 pounds of my goal weight. My results slowed significantly after that. I struggled through another two months of the program without losing another pound, and it wasn’t difficult to figure out why. The program had a very restrictive diet, and after a while I grew tired of selecting my meals from a very short list. I began eating things not on the list, and eventually gave up on the program.
The diet wasn’t sustainable because it wasn’t real life.
Real life is occasionally going out for pizza with friends, grilling out with neighbors, or having a beer during a football game.
Many financial plans and experts follow the same approach to eliminating debt as my failed diet. Sell your house, your cars, and everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Cut your living expenses to the bone, live in a cardboard box, no vacations, and no fun until every cent of your debt is gone.
That kind of life isn’t sustainable, and I wouldn’t want it to be.
We’ve made lifestyle cuts to live within our means, but we also make sure that we have money allocated for entertainment to enjoy life and to make those memories that make life worth living. If you deprive yourself of any kind of fun, eventually you may be filled with resentment of the process and fall off the wagon. If you strip your lifestyle down to the bare bones necessities, and you successfully stick with it until your debt is eliminated, what you’ve taught yourself is how to live on the bare minimum. You’ve taught yourself how to consistently say, “No!” to yourself. What you haven’t gained are the skills to live a balanced life walking the line of living within your means AND spending some of your earnings to enjoy life.
We’re almost 4 years into our debt management plan. We make the payment to our program, along with our other financial commitments each month and feed some to our emergency fund. What’s left over is ours. We go out to eat occasionally, we fought tooth and nail to keep our home, and we’ve even gone on vacation while paying off our debt. We could have eliminated our debt faster if we would have taped into gazelle intensity with more extreme frugality. But would living like hermits for years to get out of debt a few months earlier really have been worth it?
We’ve been practicing real life. We’ve learned to live within our means and enjoy life at the same time. We’ve learned to balance saying “yes” and “no” to ourselves.
That’s a lifestyle that’s sustainable.
How about you all? Where do you draw the line between aggressively saving / paying off debt and making sure you actually are enjoying life?
Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
