A couple with $90,000 in consumer debt had a turning point conversation in January 2019 and decided to sell their house to pay it off by April 2020. The speaker describes the chronic stress and blame that lifted once they became debt-free, leaving them with clarity and renewed hope for their lives.
Chapters
When in 2019, my beautiful wife Kathy and I, we owed $90,000 in debt, and that didn't include the house or the cars. And we were miserable. And we were this way for a lot of years because you don't just get $90,000 in debt overnight. You got to start with $10,000, you go to $30,000, and then you go to $50,000. And, you know, it took us years to get to that place. So we've been living in debt for years and the stress that came with that. And in 2019, we just talked between us in January at the start of the year and said, what do you want our life to really look like? And we realized that we're not living the life that we want. And when we looked at the reason why, it was us. It was the decisions we make. It was the way we handled the challenges. We were angry at everybody, everything. We were blaming God. We were angry at God. We were angry at each other. We— it was a stressful time. So we decided that we were sick of trying to wait for someone else to come fix our problems, and we were going to own it. And that was the turning point. We turned it around and we sold our house, and we use that money to pay off all our debt and start over. So in April of 2020, when the world was shutting down, we were debt-free, and it gave us clarity and a new hope and a vision for our lives and joy and peace, the kind of things we had not had in a long time because we lived under the burden of that debt.