Our Credit Card Story

I just wanted to share with you a personal story about how the pressure of credit card debt and other types of debt and financial pressure can really add unneeded stress and resentment to a relationship, in this case a marriage. However, what I do want to point out is that if your marriage is strong and you really have a deep love and respect for one another, finances should not ruin you.

Of course, there are the stray stories of people who are really sick and just can’t stop themselves from spending or doing something like gambling, but let’s face it we’re all human and most of us have been in financial trouble at one point in our lives.

My husband and I are very fortunate. We’ve worked really hard to get to where we are today, which is almost credit card debt free, but it took a long time to get there, and we’re still working on one of his college-days credit cards he racked up.

We’re able to take the occasional small vacation, although we rarely go anywhere really expensive. We didn’t even go no a honeymoon after we got married because we wanted to be smart and wait until the economy improved and our incomes improved since we rely partly on sales to feed our wallets.

We’ve made sacrifices, but we’ve also been able to have a great home with great furniture that was all paid off right away thanks to excellent incomes when the economy was good. My husband and I realized that in order to be truly financially independent, we had to be totally free of credit card debt, so we immediately went to work to clear up his debt.

I myself had a lot of credit card debt, but that was many years ago and I tried to teach him the prinicples I had learned to live by out of necessity which were that you never used credit cards unless you knew for SURE you were paying them off that same month. That way, there was absolutely no danger to get into.

The emotional toll it took on our relationship for him to confess to me the debt he was still in from years ago was pretty rough, but by talking through it and promising to be honest and open and not afraid to talk about these things, we actually made a deeper bond, and forged a new, deeper chapter in our relationship.