My Enemy… Debt

Like many in the world today, the one thing that typically holds me back from being carefree is the money I owe from satisfying my prior needs and consumer driven wants. While I was young, I enjoyed plenty of success in my professional career which I’ve benefited from by fulfilling many of my desires. However, I often felt that I would acquire the things I wanted before I was ready which left me always catching up to my lifestyle. It was only when I started to have a family that I was able to slow down and take a step back to look at my choices. Unfortunately, it was a pretty big hole I got myself into as I started to climb out.

While I won’t get into any numbers, at one point in time I found myself in debt by multiple times of my salary and with all types of loans; from student loans to mortgages. One of the things that brought the red flag to me was the fact that by the time my paycheck would come, there were periods where it all went in debt payments. It was literally living paycheck to paycheck where I started to use them more in order to acquire what I needed. It was completely unsustainable and so I took the task to improve my situation. Through conscious decisions and austerity, I was able to set a path to betterment.

At the time, about 60% of my monthly income was going to pay down debt. That only left me with barely enough for normal expenses and taxes. I set a goal to bring this down to 30% overtime. Instead of using my salary increases and bonuses to buy more things, they were used to pay down debt. In evaluating my yearly financial position, I can say that after years of committing to these decisions I have finally reached that goal. I have been looking to see where this falls in the benchmark of budgets and I’m happy to see that it is in a pretty good range although still average.

I have come to avoid debt so much that I ultimately want to be completely debt-free to no longer need to be concerned owing money to anyone person or institution. However, the society we live in makes it very difficult for that to be easily achieved. However, my goal is to achieve that by the time my daughter goes to college. Luckily, I still have a good amount of years for that to happen. I have continued to read about personal finance best practices in order to help you achieve this and thought it would be pretty good to share my experience and my thoughts going forward.

I have seen the split of expenses be practical and relatively easy to follow as it considers most of our needs. However, I am still behind on the savings side which was surprising since I am able to save about 10% of my income. Where I think I struggle the most is that I am sure that I go over my wants to this day. While I have been able to urges on the large purchases, some of the smaller ones go by unattended. For example, the weekends are almost always full of dining outside of our home which can be pretty pricey when you had it all up. However, I do enjoy the time with my family and think it is a good trade off more times than not. It is definitely something that I can adjust going forward if need be.

This is also relevant for my cryptocurrency ventures as a portion of my savings is going into them giving my belief that it will be a great asset to have long-term. While I am only purchasing Steem on a monthly basis, my intent is to expand my crypto portfolio to include others in which I add on a more frequent basis. However, I still remain focused on improving my debt situation in order to feel more freedom. What is crazy is the fact that I feel more anxious now having half the amount of debt that I had years ago. However, I think it could be age. As time passes we have less flexibility to adjust to needs as they increase over time.

I am coming to the end of my yearly financial review with only taxes left as an open item. I hope to gain for the clarity soon in order to better prepare my plan for the following year. If everything goes well, I would hope to not only continue my debt reduction plan but also accelerate the amount of cryptocurrencies I acquire over the next year. I look forward to going into my vacation next week with this on the top of my mind to finalize the plans and execute upon them.

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