Grandpa and I have been working hard on getting out of debt, or more specifically, getting out of credit card debt, on our own. Like many other Americans who are dealing with debt from credit cards and/or loans etc, working hard to reduce or eliminate debt from credit cards became our New Year’s Resolution after Christmas last year.

Of course, there is such a thing as good debt, such as paying for a mortgage that creates home equity – which after a period of time allows homeowners to sell their house at a nice profit if the housing market is right for homeowners to sell their home. Right now, the housing market sucks due to the economy, so there’s no way we’d be able to sell our house even if we wanted to, at least not for the kind of money we’d want and need to get for it.

Anyway, in order to help us meet our goals of getting out of debt completely, we made the tough decision to really tighten our financial “belt” so to speak and focus our time and energies on paying off all credit cards and loans as quickly as possible. One debt-inducing expense each year has been the amount of money that is often spent buying Christmas presents for everyone on our xmas list. We are generous gift givers, to a fault.

As the Christmas season rolls around each year, it seems there have been more and more names needing to be added to our Christmas gift list, and something has to give. Between family, friends, adult children, grandchildren, parents, grandparents, bosses, co-workers, etc – the gift giving list and available monies has its limits, especially considering our efforts to get out of debt rather than increase our debt.

As much as we’d like to be able to continue buying everyone gifts for Christmas, as well as gifts for those we haven’t bought for in awhile, getting out of debt has to be given first priority. We’re not getting any younger either. Call it selfish if you wish, but we’re focusing on ourselves and our needs, for a change.

Getting out of debt once and for all means creating and sticking to a tight budget and not creating new debt, so that any and all remaining income from our jobs and money made from being a freelance writer and blogger goes to paying down debt until there is a zero balance on any and all credit cards.

“Getting out of debt on your own” means we are doing this on our own, rather than trusting our money and credit history to possible debt consolidation scams and schemes we hear so much about it on the news and online. A friend of mine was kind enough to buy Dave Ramsey’s book called The Total Money Makeover along with the accompanying Total Money Makeover Workbook as a gift for Grandpa and I to help us in our efforts to get out of debt the smart way.

Getting Out Of Debt Blogs

I’ve been reading many of the top personal finance blogs found online for quite some time now and will continue to do so. There are hundreds of “get out of debt” blogs online, with helpful tips about easy ways to reduce debt quickly, written by knowledgeable and experienced financial experts. Many of my favorite personal finance blogs are authored by people paying off debt just like you and I, who are “blogging away debt” and explaining their journey to a debt-free life on their personal finance blogs, for free.

We don’t need consumer credit counseling help either, and there are a lot of scams regarding those too, so thanks but no thanks. Creating a budget that we can and will stick to isn’t rocket science. Coming up with some easy and simple ways to pay down credit card bills isn’t hard either.

We’re eating out less. We’re watching rented movies at home instead of spending money at the movie theater and on expensive snacks. I quit smoking and the money saved by not buying cigarettes goes towards paying down credit card debt. Brown bagging lunches, instead of eating lunch at restaurants, creates a sizable savings each week that goes towards paying off debt.

We’re also creating a grocery budget, which will help to eliminate needless spending at the grocery store on things we really don’t need to be eating. The fact that we’ve set a goal of losing some weight over the next few months will also help reduce our grocery bill too, since we won’t be spending nearly as much money on snacks and junk foods. We’re well on our way towards getting out of debt, having already paid off a couple credit cards so far, and there’s no stopping us now.

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