Pop the Champagne! It’s time to celebrate!!! A little while back I posted about the fact that I have not used credit cards for 1 year! That trend is still going, but now it’s time to celebrate an even bigger accomplishment. Being Credit Card Debt Free!!!!

 Yesterday my husband went to the bank and paid off our last bit of credit card debt. I am so relieved and happy. I HATE credit card debt. I think credit cards can be a helpful tool sometimes..let me repeat SOMETIMES…but most of the time I believe it is the root of all evil and pretty much a major reason why our country is where it is today…but I digress. This post is about our accomplishment. Before getting married my husband and I racked up a pretty large credit card bill for a few reasons. A major reason is because we put our entire Greece Honeymoon on the credit card. I wouldn’t trade that trip in for the world, and I am so very happy that my husband convinced me it was worth the money. It’s just that even though we came to terms that it was going to take us a while to pay off (on a 0% APR card of course) when it came time to view that first bill the task was a bit daunting. But we did it! We rose to the challenge. Not only did we have our honeymoon, but we had a few other debts to take care of. One being that each of us entered the marriage with some credit card debt, and two being that although most of our wedding was taken care of financially, there were still some things we just had to pay for…and alot of that went on credit cards.

How did we do it? Well this isn’t a personal finance blog so I won’t go into the specifics (actually I don’t know the full specifics cause my husband made our plan) but I do know that we made sure to get whatever balances we could on to 0% APR cards. That was the most important. Interest is a killer and we wanted to make sure we weren’t losing ground each month. Another big thing was DETERMINATION. No it’s not easy to take money each month and pay off credit cards. It actually sucks. I can think of a lot of other things I would like to do with that money…but I knew, for myself that before we could move forward we had to take care of this debt. This is stupid debt if you ask me. Yes we have a mortgage, yes my husband has student loans from law school and yes we both drive cars…all debt…but credit card debt is debt that we racked up on things we just didn’t need (minus the honeymoon of course).

I am now back on track with my philosophy that if you can’t afford to pay cash (or with a debit) then you can’t afford it. Now, I do believe in taking advantage of promotions for say buying a couch for example…1 year 0% on payments. See that works, because you have a plan to pay it off. You divide how much you have to pay each month to pay it off in the year and make sure you do so. It doesn’t get out of control. So that is an amendment to my rule…a rule that I plan on sticking to.

I am very thankful my husband was on board with me on this. Debt and money can cause so much trouble and so many problems. I figure if we stay out of credit card debt then we are one step ahead of the game. So now we celebrate. We celebrate our accomplishment and we celebrate the clean slate we have in front of us. Now we can focus on our present and our future…not our past debt.