Originally written 8/26. Not posted then so I could edit out the stupidity and profanity. (Yes, I think most profanity is stupidity, but I am fairly sure both were in the earlier version.)

We’ve spent a year getting out of debt. Gah! It seems like far longer than a year, but I don’t think we made our plans until last year. I’ll have to look and see. No, it’s not even a year. We really started in October of last year.

Since then we have retired $18K of credit card debt, $18K of student loans, $15K car loans, plus about $12K on our house.

That’s good, right?

Mostly.

We still owe $17K to our savings account.

We leased a car that costs almost as much total and per month as my car, which we just paid off this summer. So we retired one debt for another.

And we now have over $3K in credit card debt. ($2800 on AmEx. $175 on Visa. $115 on Firestone. I think about $185 on Discover.) We can pay part of AmEx off immediately. The Visa, Firestone, and Discover won’t be due till the end of next month- when we’ll have the money to pay for them. The Visa is my spending money. The Discover was clothes for me and the boys. Obviously the $115 was for the car.

But we’ll still owe for half the AmEx.

This semester I will make about $4200 from my part-time jobs. It’s a lot of work for a reasonable amount of money. But it’s not going to fill up our savings account.

And, looking at it from here, it doesn’t look like we can live on what R makes. Once again we’re in debt and we can’t pay it off immediately.

That scares me.

I am terrified of owing money that we can’t pay off by the end of September, without my paycheck. Insecurity city going on here.