House repairs - no bueno

I got the estimates for the repairs that I need to do on the house before it is ready to sell. It's better than I feared, but not as good as I had hoped. I think it's going to come out to around $3,000, if I do some of the work myself. If I have to pay to have all of it, it will probably be closer to $4,000. Since I'm going to ultimately make a profit on the house, I'm okay with paying for some repairs, but it stinks in the meantime. I've decided that I am going to have to put some of these things on a credit card. I just don't have the cash flow to pay for all of this stuff, plus my regular bills. I'm trying to limit what I pay for with credit to the absolute minimum, and then make minimum payments on my one remaining credit card and use cash for everything else.

This is not what I wanted to do, but I don't really think I have any other options...

Just say NO! to credit cards

I am really trying to go completely cold turkey with my credit cards. I cut up 2 credit cards entirely, but I can't bring myself to totally destroy the other 2. I took one of them out of my wallet and hid it in my desk drawer at work and I am still keeping the other one in my wallet, but I am trying to forget it is there. I hid it deep in the back of a bunch of other things.

It feels good to know that I am not getting any deeper into debt anymore. The down side of this situation is that I have to really budget now. Like, really budget. I can't just decide to make a purchase on a whim, because doing so now means I am going to overdraw my checking account. That is probably what got me so deep into this hole anyway.

I'm still just a little bit scared that something is going to come up that I won't be able to handle with my cash-on-hand, and will end up needed to resort to credit.

I have my "Dave Ramsey baby step 1" emergency fund of $1,000 in savings, so I think I should be able to thwart off any potential emergencies, as long as they are $1,000 dollar issues or less.

Worse than I thought

I have now spent quite a bit of time trying to get a real picture of where I stand financially, and let me tell you, it is not pretty. I want to say it is worse than I thought, but in reality, I didn’t think about it at all. With every single one of my accounts in one place to look at, I am faced with an even bigger challenge than I thought I was going into. I started to get a little more serious about paying off my debts over the last few months, but it is only now that I am truly declaring a war against my debt. I’ve listed each of my debts below. These are actually not the current balances for my credit cards, but they are the balances at the highest point, which was just a few months ago for each. I wanted to give myself a more accurate starting point to work from, plus it makes me feel a little better that I’ve already made some progress on paying it down.

I have 4 credit cards with balances, along with a car loan. My car is actually scheduled to be paid off the same month as my 30th birthday, so at least I have one thing going for me. When I went through several months of each of my credit cards, I had some realizations. I knew each of the individual balances was steadily growing, but I made big payments to them each month, so I just assumed eventually they would stop growing. The real problem was that I continued to use the cards regularly. I pretty much lived on my credit cards for everything, then at the end of the month, I took all the money in my bank account and made the payments. I just didn’t pay attention to what the difference between those amounts was.

So, here is the complete list of people to whom I owe a ridiculous amount of money:

Banana Republic - $597.70
American Express - $1880.42
Nordstrom Visa - $5197.32
Citibank - $25,339.16

Car Loan - $4,614.62

Total $38, 229.06