Thanks to the celebrity-obsessed media, we constantly hear stories of professional athletes who squander their bloated salaries, lottery winners whose winnings are spent before they’re even counted, and celebrity millionaires who can’t even balance a checkbook. We the common folk rarely get to see this up close and personal, and even fewer live it. For Jefferson and myself, we still haven’t tasted riches, but we have successfully made the switch from carrying debt to having a surplus and the question of what in the world to do with it. We recently sold our house and will be moving into a new home later this month. While we won’t be rolling in the dough necessarily, we will have a nice chunk to play with, so to speak. We are so relieved to be free from debt that we are in no way planning to splurge on all new furniture (Our broken couch gets to stay. It’s a conversation piece after all.), but we do have a new understanding of the riches to rags phenomenon. The less-known phenomenon is a little easier to grasp, and it’s called the debt cycle.
Looking back at how much debt we paid off in a little over a year’s time, you can easily see that we were super motivated and frugal as you-know-what the whole time. A lot of what got me through with my sanity intact were my dreams of our better life that was just around the corner. Undoubtedly, a lot of my dreams were of what I was going to buy and where I was going to shop once I was debt-free. Sounds great, right? Wrong. We still have to budget and we definitely can’t get all of the things I’d been dreaming we would. Not now, and maybe not in the next ten years. We are getting a new house, and that is an amazing feat for this recently debt-burdened family. However, that’s probably where our spending will have to cease until later this year. Don’t get me wrong; we are in a great place where we *can* go shopping for clothing if we want and even splurge on an actual bottle of wine instead of the box stuff, but why go crazy now? This is exactly why people who suddenly fall into money have a hard time living within their means, and precisely why people who have climbed out of debt find it so easy to slip back down the hillside. If I bought every single item I’d been daydreaming about since we started this process, I might find myself right back where we started in no time flat. Trust; it’s not hard to rack up debt! In fact, it’s really fun to spend wads of dough you don’t really have! However, it’s just not worth it. Budget will always be a part of our vocabulary, even if we ever found ourselves in the upper middle, or even upper upper class. I’ve grown so much in the last several months and know now that this is just reality for most people. Yes, even the uber riche Beyonce and Jay-Z have to say “no” to themselves occasionally.
If you are still wearing the shackles of credit card debt and looking forward to the commencement of your debtdom like it is the end of a prison sentence, stop. My husband and I feel much lighter now knowing that our future is more secure and that our children will be able to go to college and get a car even, but getting out of debt in no way means that we can go back to spending like we once did. That’s exactly what got us into the mess in the first place. We *will* be taking a vacation this year, though! Maybe we’ll see Beyonce and Jay-Z on their yacht. Wave back if you see us, guys! We’ll be the family of 5 stuffed into a small pontoon boat. Livin the life!