And again. And again. And one more time.... Okay, so this could go on forever. But I think you get my point. None of us are perfect, very rarely do we ever do something perfectly the first time and then keep hitting perfection each time.
Like my oldest daughter says "h space a space h space a" (10 year old sarcasm, heaven help us). Most of the time life is a series of high, low, high again, serious crash, repeat and repeat.
We started getting serious about getting out of debt way back in 2008. Nope you didn't read that wrong. We only had 3 kids, we were younger and we had less than half of the debt we're carrying now. So what happened between then and 2015? Why did we add a ton more to our load?
I already told you about grad school. We also made a couple more stupid choices along the way. So here we are again, we are blessed to have 5 kids and sadly, twice as much debt and we're following the same plan that we started on all those years ago.
What's different this time around? Why do we think it's going to work?
Well this time the kids are involved. When we started our oldest wasn't even in kindergarten and now we have 4 in elementary school. Greg and I talk about being in debt and the things that we're doing to get out of it. We've told them about the way that being in debt robs your freedom. Last week I drew a thermometer on construction paper. It's our debt tracker and it has numbers on each side. On the right is the total amount we have to pay back and on the left is the running total of what is done. It's pretty exciting to come into the kitchen and see them gathered around the paper seeing how much we have paid back.
One of the things that has made us so motivated is knowing that we have 5 kids headed on missions and to college in the not distant future. Somehow all of that has to be paid for and we don't want to be unable to help our children because we are still cleaning up our mistakes. That's a huge incentive.
I've shared with you how Greg and I are both committed to this plan but it bears repeating. We are on the same page. Totally. Sadly that hasn't always been true. After our fourth child was born in 2009 I just kinda went off the deep end. I lost touch with everything that mattered for a couple of years. That included our finances. Greg would try to encourage me to get back on track so that we could get rid of our debt but I wouldn't respond. We were making great money back then so technically this debt could be gone by now but because I was just barely surviving I couldn't do it. We lost those few years but now we're back. Everyone is mentally and physically healthy and we can devote our resources to this massive goal.
Am I certain that this time around is going to be different? Well, no. I occasionally worry but I'm not focused on the fear of failure. Instead we keep working and praying and talking about what we are doing. We're planning a celebration trip for when this debt is gone. The kids have decided where they want to go (Nashville, Disney World and a cruise, oh my) and Greg has printed out pictures of a cruise ship and a Disney World map for us to drool over. Every morning after family prayer we practice our debt free scream (WE'RE DEBT FREE!!!) and we just keep following our plan. I don't know what's coming next but I do know that we paid off one of our little debts just yesterday and man, that feels good.
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