Credit Card Debt $0

Ironically, two months before I planned to pay off my credit card debt, my number was stolen and used to make $200+ in purchases at two Target stores in Colorado. It’s been years since I’ve shopped at a Target and I’ve never even been to Colorado, so it’s odd to think of my credit card living a life of shopping thrills without me. I’ve put the expenses into dispute with my credit card company and, with any luck, I won’t have to pay them.

In the meantime, I’ve paid off my credit card debt!

The balance reflects three big fat zeros: $0.00. Actually, the font my credit card company uses on their website makes them look rather skinny, but in my mind they’re round and robust and well-earned!

A History with Debt

A few years ago, I decided to do battle with my debt. It’s been an up-and-down roller coaster for the past 12 years, but you can see from this chart that it’s been mostly downhill (in the good way) for the past three years.

I detailed the roller coaster in my last post about becoming debt-free: Below $10K.

Tensions that Keep Us in Debt

While this downward momentum looks quite dramatic, my budget numbers tell me that being debt free was possible many, many times before in my life. The dissonance between my goals and actions finally made sense when I was re-reading The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. In a chapter on personal mastery, Senge explains creative tension as the gap between vision and current reality. It’s the tension between your business idea and actually starting the business; the exercise plan and actually exercising.

It’s not, though, emotional tension, which is when you experience anxiety or negative emotions because your vision and reality don’t match up. The risk of emotional tension within creative tension is when our anxiety makes us lower our vision to match the reality, rather than stepping up our actions to make the vision a reality.

And then there are structural conflicts keeping us from our visions – as if emotional tension weren’t enough! Structural conflicts happen, sometimes, when “life” just happens. My car gets towed and costs an arm and a leg to retrieve, delaying one of my extra credit card payments, for example. But structural conflicts can happen when our underlying beliefs are challenged by making our visions a reality.

I think I’ve lived with debt for so long that it’s become the norm for me. And it’s a well-supported norm for much of American society, so I’m not alone in this. I also haven’t lived an adult year that didn’t involve debt, so I have some unconscious (now conscious) worries about what that means. I imagine that structural conflicts have unconsciously kept me in debt for much longer than I’d like to admit.

A Vision Worth Moving Toward

Articulating these tensions didn’t happen in time to help pay off my credit, but they are helping me pay off my student loans within the next few months. My credit cards could have been paid off many times over if I didn’t have an unconscious system of debt and overspending. But now that the end is in sight for all of my debt, I’m building a conscious vision and reality for my life without debt. It’s one in which I save and invest quite aggressively, with some long-term goals in mind, while also knocking items off of my bucket list in a very systematic way.

The vision I’ve created for life-after-debt is quite adventurous, while also being financially sound.

Are there hidden beliefs or support systems you’ve rigged up to keep you in debt?

If you didn’t have debt, what would you do differently?

 

Photo credit: Got Credit