The Story, Part 5
By Ryan Healy | October 17, 2007
My focus on reducing our debt paid off during late 2006.
Every time I got paid for a new copywriting project, I’d practically zero out my bank account to pay off outstanding debts. This reduced our debt fast. Here’s a snapshot of what our debt load was like when we started…
After just 11 months of intense effort, we managed to reduce our debt by nearly half. Here is a snapshot from April 2007…
After the whole interest rate hike with MBNA/Bank of America, I had declared war on the credit card companies. And make war I did.
As you’ll see in the second image, we had eliminated $21,583.12 in unsecured debt. If you do the math, that’s a reduction of $1,962.10 per month.
Some months we did better than others. In the second image you’ll also see a box that says “Reduction.” In that cell I had put a formula to automatically calculate how much we reduced our debt each month.
If we didn’t reduce debt, the figure would show up positive. This still keeps us honest when we’re not moving in the right direction.
Most of my ability to pay down debt was because of me raising my fees as a freelance copywriter. So I used my increase in income to pay down my debt.
But I also reduced costs.
When I began to catch up on my accounting, I was able to see how much money I had been wasting on education I wasn’t using. As a result, I immediately slashed a number of monthly subscriptions that required monthly membership fees. I was able to use the money I saved to further my cause.
Now, at this point in the story, you might be thinking it’s almost over. But it’s not. You see, there’s another speed bump ahead. Once I share it with you, it will bring us up to the current time. At which point we can really get down to the business of getting out of this mess.
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Topics: Case Studies |
3 Responses to “The Story, Part 5”
Comments
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October 18th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Nice and inspiring story, I too have a similar story, not to get rich quick but premature spending. Great learning. I’ll not get into the get rich quick mode now. Nice that you are self employed… it’s difficult for people like me who are salaried.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Wow, I have been reading from part one and you REALLY messed up big time with all those schemes. It is a good thing you finally noticed what was happening and took the steps to correct your errors.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Yep. To this day, buying those vending machines has been my biggest financial mistake ever. :-0
Oh, well. Live and learn!