My wife Ashley and I pinched pennies the past few years to pay down debt and get above water from a purely financial perspective.
There’s a support group for most American families who worked hard, scraped by, and did their best to pay down debts to eliminate credit card and interest payments: it’s called everybody.
It wasn’t easy. Now my amazing wife is a stay at home mom who is an incredible mother who is raising our three kids who are home: Maksym (7), Emeryk (5), and Victoria (3).
While we struggled to pay down debt, Ashley was a Social Worker, who worked hard to improve the lives of the less fortunate. I’m not sharing any deep family financial secrets, but folks who go into Social Work assuredly aren’t doing it for an astronomical paycheck.
From a financial standpoint, our family “battened down the hatches” and closely watched every penny that went out the door.
We were rabid about paying down and off two credit cards and we knew we were facing a huge end-of-lease payment to keep our family SUV, which is needed to chauffeur three kids in child safety seats and booster seats.
It wasn’t easy. We made tough choices as a family. Sure, we could have easily called our car loan institution to stretch out payments or even extend the loan to only have a monthly payment. It was an option to call the two credit card companies and increase our lines of credit.
That wouldn’t have solved our issue or made a dent in the principal. While this was an option, it was the equivalent of putting our finger in the dam, simply delaying the principal payments on those three outstanding debts.
We didn’t take a $15,000 family trip to Disney, we shopped at generic brand stores, even ransacking our house to find a massive amount of clothes to sell to consignment stores. We literally sold clothes for extra cash.
As best as we could, we lived by many of the principles espoused by nationally known financial expert Dave Ramsey, which includes stashing away $1,000 for emergencies, paying off debt, and avoiding leases like the plague.
While it was difficult, challenging, and not ideal, at the end of last year we were able to sock away enough to fully pay off both credit cards and pay off the entire balance of what was left on our SUV.
Ashley and I lived within our means, paid off principal, drastically reduced debt, and are in a stronger financial position to take care of our family for years to come.
How much better off would the United States government be if Congress and national politicians did the same thing? Right now the national debt is an astounding $36.7 trillion. The independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts this financial albatross around our necks will climb to $56 trillion in ten years.
This means every man, woman, and child in America would have to cough up $106,000 each to pay off the principal.
Since that’s not feasible, right now the government pays more on the interest on the national debt than we do on national defense. Let that sink in: America is not paying down principal, only making interest payments on its “credit card,” and that bill is more than what we pay to defend our great nation.
Now more than ever, we need to support President Trump and Elon Musk in their mission to reduce spending and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse from the bloated bureaucracy.
Your family will wallow in financial hell in perpetuity if all you’re doing is paying high-interest payments on your credit card and not making a dent in principal.
This is exactly what the federal government is doing.
If they don’t embrace painful but necessary spending reductions, Congress is putting our national security at further risk by further bankrupting the United States.
My family did it. The federal government must do the same.