Free At Last!

Around the time my wife and I were married, my parents sat us down for the talk... on credit card debt. I seem to remember them spending about an hour recounting the horrors of excess credit card debt and how it's easiest not to get into it in the first place.

Well, apparently we didn't remember that talk a few years later when our lifestyle cost slightly more than my salary. After a significant buildup of debt, and a couple of decent raises, we decided to finally start chipping away at the credit card. We spent quite a while trying to pay the debt off, but the ridiculous interest rate kept eating up much of our payments. Finally, someone suggested we transfer the balance to a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers for one year.

We have sunk hundreds of dollars a month into that card for the past year, trying to pay it off before the 0% interest ended. We think the credit card company was well aware of what we were doing, since they kept raising our credit limit and encouraging us to actually use the card rather than just pay it off. On March 31st, my wife made the last payment on the credit card. And now we're free! Free! And given the current credit crisis in this country, it looks like we're just in time, too.