About Me - My Story
Married, with two wonderful boys ages 15 and 11. We are in the midst of breaking free from [credit card debt] and welcome you to follow our journey.
And from My debt Settlement Post so everyone knows my story:
My Debt Settlement Story
Monday, May 14th, 2007Hello everyone! I’m new to the blogging world, but not new to the traps of credit cards. On this blog I will be tracking my story from start to finish or as much as I can through this journey. It all begins..
About 5 years ago:
My husband and I were looking for something to increase our income, we decided to open a business and start doing embroidery. At the time we were probably about 20K in debt. The business took awhile to get up and running so we were making payments on the equipment, and we got caught up with “keeping up with the Jones” and we bought two cars, and took some vacations, etc. A few years into this my husband quit his job to work our embroidery business, but as it was slow some months, busier others, we had a hard time mananging our budget. We also decided to help some friends out with our credit and bought two houses and a third house we fixed up and was going to sell. Needless to say, the house didn’t sell and all the repairs were put on our credit card. One of our friends bailed on the house and we ended up having to come up with monthly payments, etc. So here we are today! About 70K in credit card debt!
Now coming to the decision to go this route wasn’t easy, and I’m still nevous about it, as we have never been late on any payment. But each month it gets harder to keep this up and I have been juggling things for two years. We don’t want this hanging over us for years and years. I don’t believe Bankrupcy is an option for us as we have to many assets but with the market right now everyone would just take a loss, and I don’t want to put our embroidery business in jeporday as this year it is really starting to take off. Thus settlement seems like the only option (I did talk to debt consolidation counselor and our payments would basically be the same, so not an option either). We also looked at using a settlement company, but the fee’s to be paid to them could be going towards getting this paid off. So my husband and I are going to try this ourselves and if it doesn’t work we can always go to the company in a few months.
Ok so now on to the good stuff the numbers, our accounts and the first late payments we have had in 10 years:
Chase card 1 - Balance about $6500 - will be late as of 5/28/07
Chase card 2 - Balance about $22000 - will be late as of 5/28/07
Citicard - Balance about $24000 - will be late as of 6/5/07
Bank of American - Balance $17000 - will be late as of 5/27/07
Total $69500.00
Geez even writing it is scary!
Our PLAN
Money we just received from an embroidery order about $5K going into savings, 1K from this month we can put into savings as well, 2K from an extra check in June and we are shooting for $800 a month into our savings each month along with any extra we can get. Total by the end of Dec (about 6 months late then on all four cards)
5k
1K - May
2K - June
4800 - 800 x 6 months
$12800 to go towards settlements - by end of 2007
I know this will not be enough to settle all of them, but it should be a good start.
As I go through this process and get calls/letters, mail letters out, I will provide my experiences and sucesses/failures so hopefully anyone else looking to do this themselves might find some helpful information.
Wish me luck!
Jen
