Down With Debt

... with myself. We have waaayyyyy too much debt. The cause... overspending of course. But there is one extenuating circumstance that attributes to a large chunk of it. I was self employed for almost 5 years and making very low income during the whole time. Now I am employed and making a decent salary as is my husband. But we still don't seem to be getting anywhere.

We have a 9 year old daughter who is active in a number of sports/activities. Kids are expensive!

I'm admittedly also a spender on silly things that I need to curb. We have lots of room for improvement.

Here are the numbers:

HELOC - $260k
LOC - $55k
CC #1 - $1,200

I recently applied for and obtained the increase to my LOC to pay off all CCs but $1,200 of the one listed above. This will give us a lower interest rate but overall monthly payments won't change a huge amount at this point. We are set up for auto minimum payments on the LOC so it will go down over time. But the intent is to throw more $$ against it every month. It should also simplify things for us - we were balancing too many card payments, etc.

The HELOC is where we do everthing - all income goes in and all expenses come out. As a result, we are really only paying the interest on this and it doesn't go down. Again, focusing on this but it's at a lower rate than the LOC so want to focus more on paying that off.

That's my update for now. Hi to everyone.