About My Debt

I've read many blogs, and everyone has a story as to how they accumulated their debt. Mine isn't too complicated. My husband and I met in college, accumulated lots of debt with student loans- we consolidated our student debt together in 2000 when we were married. In 2003, my daugther was born and we moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina (for the lower cost of living and better weather). I was planning to be a stay-at-home parent, but that didn't work out. I was unemployed for 7 months, and my husband was unemployed for 9 months. We had about $30K saved up for a down payment on a house at that time, but most of that went to living expenses while we were taking care of an infant and job hunting.

In 2004, we found jobs, and were approved for a mortgage. 2 weeks after we moved into our first home, my husband's car needed lots of repairs, so we had to buy another one (a used one). In October, 2004- my husband's job went full time and we needed to put our daughter in daycare full time. So, that's when it became difficult to make ends meet- between the mortgage, car payment, student loan, and high cost of daycare- we've been floundering ever since. We have been accumulating more credit card debt- mainly from home maintenance and repairs and numerous car repairs.

We've been trying to use the snowball method to pay down the debt. We had paid off about $3,000 in the past 12 months, but last week our cars needed thousands of dollars in repair...so we're pretty much in the same situation we were in last year.

Here's how our monthly payments break down right now:
25% to the mortgage
25% to daycare
25% to our debt- auto loan, student loan, 2 credit cards (unfortunately usually only the minimum payment)
and that leaves about 25% of our salaries for food, gas, utilities, and other expenses...and even with budgeting, this is not enough.