debt

Raise your hand if you are in debt and wondering if you will get out from under it. Yeah, me too. I did some bill calculations last night and I either need to re-think my budget or get a raise. Since the latter is about as likely as a hippo squeezing out of my buttocks, I need to figure out a disciplined budget of some kind.

It is hard to have a girlfriend and not buy her stuff. Not big fancy stuff. Just little things here and there. But those things add up. Missy and I have begun to try to shave down our expenditures when we are hanging out because we are already busy buying plane tickets to see each other.

The bottom line, if I can be so open, is that I have just over $2000 in credit card debt. My school loans, which are just under $25,000, have to be paid back starting in December. Of course the regular bills of rent, insurance, gas, utilities, and doing meals out with Horizon folks still roll in every month.

Now, I am not about pissing and moaning when I know that I am blessed well beyond so many people that I pass-by every day. I just want to be honest. And this is the middle class plight. Debt seems to be haunting all of our lives. I am in need of a good budgeting system that will help me leave all this debt in the dust.

I remember Dave Cowan saying that Satan operates much like credit cards. The Enemy gives us something up front that seems great but the debt that accrues on our lives creates a terrible payback in the end. I may not be going too far by suggesting that credit cards operate much like Satan. They tend to bind us to our past purchases and past splurges. And they weigh on us and hang over our heads so that we are no longer free to use our resources the way they should be used.

In the end, credit is not the enemy... our own undisciplined spending is. Credit just likes to trade in grace and forgiveness and instead operate on interest. Maybe that is why it is so hard for us to forgive others. We live in an APR world of cash advances and credit limits.