I wish losing weight was as easy as paying off credit card debt. Of course, for the person buried in credit card debt without enough money to eat or enough time to sit around and get fat, I’m sure the opposite would be true.

I guess we all have our strengths and weaknesses. My weakness is clearly food. I wouldn’t quite say budgeting and reducing debt is my strength, but I have found that except for a few things that I really enjoy doing I have found it pretty easy to cut expenses. In fact, as time has gone by, I’m continuing to cut my expenses and October 2008 marked my lowest spending month since starting this get-out-of-debt project over a year ago.

As an example, I just made the ’sacrifice’ of cutting cable TV. I did this while my wife and I are earning more money than we ever have in our lives. I’m absolutely not trying to brag about that, we aren’t rich by any means, though we would probably fall into the above-average category for income. My point is that we could easily continue to spend the money on cable TV, but our priorities are changing. The more I work for other people, the more I realize that is not what I want to be doing and the fastest way I can see that situation changing is to continue to cut expenses, pay off debt, and save up cash. I’m getting off topic though. The point of this post is a long overdue update of my credit card debt progress.

When I last wrote about my credit card debt (as of the end of August 2008), I owed $14,338.45. As of the end of October, I owe $10,271.09. Not only did I pay off about $4,000 in two months, but I also bought a brand new MacBook Pro during that time!

So how the heck is this possible? We didn’t win the lottery or find a few thousand dollars of change in our couch. It’s simply been a matter of hard work and cutting spending more and more every month. I’m fortunate that my career easily translates to freelance work. I basically sit on my couch at home and build websites on my laptop. And I make pretty decent money for my efforts. It can be a drag sometimes, but it’s hard to say no to the extra money. I don’t make a lot at my day job, but the money I earn on the side is a nice supplement to my regular salary.

If you are working at getting out of debt I strongly encourage you to find something you’re good at doing and then find a way to get people to pay you to do that for them. It may be related to what you do for your day job or maybe not, but if you can find a way to make some money on the side for something you don’t mind doing it can really accelerate your plan to get out of debt.

At the start of the year, I had hopes of paying off all my credit card debt in 2008. It’s not likely at this point, but I’m not going to rule it out either. At the very least, I’ll be close and it’s starting to feel really good. I was able to pay off two different accounts and that makes life a little more simple too. Just two more cards and $10,000 to go!

By Eden, Fri 7 Nov 2008, Comments Categories: Credit Cards, Debt, Monthly Report

Fortunately, the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights passed the House of Representatives on September 23rd, though it still must pass the Senate and the President.

I’m glad it passed, but I’m also concerned about the 112 morons representatives who voted AGAINST this bill. What is wrong with these people? I don’t know if they are all in the pockets of the credit card companies, but really I can only assume these people are much more interested in the rights of credit card companies to rip us off than our rights to not be ripped off.

Check this link to see if your representatives voted yes or no and take action to kick out the fools who voted no on this bill. Three representatives who voted no are from Arizona (where I live), but none of them are from my district (thankfully). I did write to the one Representative who accepts email from someone outside of his district (I can see why the others don’t want to hear from anyone else). Please take some time to let these people know what you think of their actions.

By Eden, Thu 25 Sep 2008, Comments Categories: Credit Cards

Update: Looks like the Flash chart didn’t load properly at first- should be corrected now.

Now that I’m 1 year into the blog, I’d like to get back to tracking my credit card debt payoff progress monthly. Included below is a chart of the progress I have made.

The good news is that I have paid off $11,221 of credit card debt over the past year. The bad news is that my progress slowed down greatly over the past 6 months and my average paid off per month is only $863. Toward the end of 2007 and early 2008 I was typically paying off between one and two thousand per month.

Basically, my spending has crept back up over the past 6 months and I just haven’t been as tight with the budget as I was at the beginning. I’m working to get my spending back in line now and hoping to get closer to the $2,000 per month of extra payments range going forward.

Credit Card Debt

Credit card debt progress since August 2007

By Eden, Mon 8 Sep 2008, Comments Categories: Credit Cards, Debt

Warren Buffett suggests avoiding credit cards.

If I borrowed money at 18 or 20 percent, I’d be broke…. So if I had one piece of advice for young people generally it would be to just avoid credit cards.”

Read the whole article from CNBC.com.

I think it is more wise to follow the advice of the world’s richest man than it is to follow the advice of our in-debt friends and family or Visa and Mastercard commercials.

By Eden, Thu 3 Jul 2008, Comments Categories: Credit Cards

I started a series of posts on Remembering Why I Don’t Want Another Credit Card to help keep track of the things I read that cause me to think to myself, “I never want to deal with a credit card company again!“. That was a start, but not quite the right solution to my problem since I would have to go digging through single posts when I want to review the list. So…I started a page, Credit Card Stories, with a list of articles, news stories, resources, or anything else that causes me to remember the phrase “I never want to deal with a credit card company again!“.

For the record, I do not think that credit cards are evil, though I do think that most credit card companies are evil (or at least dirty) and personally I want nothing more to do with them.

A few people successfully game the system and earn money with their credit cards (playing what is commonly known as credit card arbitrage). Go right ahead if that floats your boat, but I don’t want to invest my time keeping tabs of every little transaction, changes in policy, or dealing with customer service at a credit card company when they inevitably make a mistake and try to steal my money.

You can’t argue that people make money with this game, but I’ve never read biographies of the rich getting rich by playing credit card arbitrage. I’ll try to make my wealth the old fashioned way and I think achieving wealth will be much easier if credit card companies don’t have a part in my financial life.

For the vast majority of people, credit cards do not help you to achieve financial freedom! If you carry a balance, your finances are moving in the wrong direction. You need the power of compound interest working for you, not against you, to become wealthy. Credit cards may seem like part of the American Way, but they don’t have to be.

Visit the Credit Card Stories page for some inspiration to say goodbye to credit cards and feel free to send me links to include in the list. I know I have missed a lot of good articles and I will be updating the list indefinitely.

By Eden, Sun 6 Jan 2008, Comments Categories: Credit Cards