Opting for the Minimum Payment Changed My Life (For The Worse)

Authored by Mary Hunt via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

At the time, it seemed like a good idea. But going for the minimum payment option “just this one time” turned out to be the worst mistake of my life. The day I opened that door and walked through it, I altered the course of my life.

Make purchases with a plan to pay the money back. shisu_ka/Shutterstock

I reasoned that I didn’t have enough money to pay the credit card balances in full, so what was I supposed to do (oh, hear me whine)? I’d catch up next month and pay everything down to $0 before my husband found out. All I needed was a little breathing room.

And with that, I made a 180-degree turn and headed down the road to financial devastation.

What was an option the first time I made only the minimum payments soon became my only choice. I deceived myself into believing that even though I didn’t have enough money to pay for things now, somehow I’d have enough to pay for them later. I believed that banks and department stores wouldn’t lend me this much money if they didn’t know that I could afford it—and wasn’t that a nice surprise.

It took 12 years to ruin my life, putting me in danger of losing my marriage, my family, and my home.The only thing that stopped me was that I ran out of credit.

With both of us unemployed and having just received notice that our home was scheduled to go into foreclosure, I arrived at the end of myself.

I owed more than $100,000 on all of my handy credit accounts—and all of them in default—so there was no more credit. No more options. I was out of hope with nowhere to turn. It was in the darkness of fear and despair that I realized what I’d done to myself, my husband, and my family.

Through my remorse and pain, I turned to God and made this promise: I would pay back all of the debt no matter how long it took or what I had to do, if I could only keep my family and my home.

For the next 10 years, I did exactly that. I never worked so hard in my life. Overnight I turned into a cheapskate—frugal beyond the legal limit, I’m sure. I worked every kind of job I could get my hands on. I developed a payback plan. I became a giver and a saver even while deeply in debt. After 10 years and $88,000 repaid, I was restless. This was taking too long. So, as just another way to raise funds, I decided to try my hand at writing a subscription newsletter with the goal to help others do what we were doing. That was in 1992. It wasn’t an overnight success, but almost. And in the process, I developed a passion to learn all I could about personal money management.

Here’s an example: My very first step was to make a vow that I would only buy groceries that I could pay for with cash (no checkbook, no plastic allowed). Wow, that was like throwing a bucket of cold water in my face. I had a new awareness of what things really cost. I had to keep track of what I was putting in my grocery cart. The next step came quickly: I had to find a way to spend less to buy what we needed so I could walk out with cash in my pocket.

Finding ways to do that put a big smile on my face and gave me the confidence and the desire to take another step. And another and another.

It took 13 years to pay back a whopping credit card debt of more than $100,000(an amount that would be closer to $300,000 in 2022 dollars), but we did it—one cost-cutting hack or tip at a time. For years now we have been completely debt-free. What joy and financial freedom we now enjoy! Debt-free truly is the way to be.