This is the best $0 has felt in a long-ass time.
It took me a little over three years to clear out the debt I had accrued since being hired to my current job. A lot of people in debt talk about how they have this single, solid number that they need to work down to clear themselves of debt. Mine had always been revolving.
About a year and a half ago, I prematurely declared victory over my consumer debt. I was doing fine, but I got comfortable and started spending money on the card again, playing a game of “buy an item here, buy an item there, let it accrue a finance charge, and pay 200% over the minimum payment and I’ll be fine.”
But I was not fine. I re-accrued all of the debt I had worked so hard to pay down.
Since I started to get steady-income-spendy in 2007, I’ve paid about $10,000 in principal and fees on this credit card. There are so many other things that money could be: down payment and initial payments on a car, down payment put in a brokerage account for a down payment on a house, money for The Boy and I to have a nice wedding…
I’m going to keep this credit card, I use it to make purchases online and for the cell phone bill. But I’m going to go back to how I was with my credit card in college: limited purchases, track every penny, pay the debt down in full.
I have one card that still needs to be paid down to be entirely consumer-debt free (Mary Kay inventory), but I can now slog this credit card’s payment into the other one, and I will clear that debt out by April of next year.
It feels good.
The Blog of JulZ 
Congratulations! That’s a good feeling. We swore off credit cards 2 years ago because we had so much debt. It’s a struggle sometimes, but well worth it as the balances creep downward.
(found you via the Friday 5)