Interest

When my debt was just sitting, I didn’t think that much about the interest I was paying.  At least, not until the point where my cards were so close to their limits that when the interest hit they were in danger of going over limit.  The fee for going over my credit limit ranged from $25-38 on my three cards.  I don’t know how many times I paid overlimit fees, but I know that it was more than once.

Fees are bad, but what about the hundreds of dollars in interest I was paying?  If you notice in my As The Debt Stands posts, the balance on my Capital One Visa has remained almost the same for the last eight months, yet I have been making minimum payments on it this whole time. That’s kind of maddening.

In the early years of my growing my debt, I simply was not making enough money to do anything but make minimum payments.  In the year before I finally started doing something about my debt, though, I was making plenty of money and yet still mostly making only minimum payments.  Sometimes I would make an extra payment of $500 or even $1000, but in the end the interest kept me from getting anywhere.

As I’ve said before, my debt doesn’t make me angry at the people I have borrowed money from.  Their terms were clear from the beginning and I borrowed anyway.  And, I don’t say that from on high and it’s not like saying I have no regrets, where obviously you do have regrets and you’re trying to convince yourself not to.  The anger just simply isn’t there.

What is there is a desire to get out of these relationships where I give more than I ever get.  I want to be free of creditors, so that the money I work really hard to earn is all my own.  When I started this eight months ago, I was paying almost $300 a month in interest.  I knew just off the top of my head how much interest I was paying on each card, but I’d never added it up before.  That’s absolutely ridiculous.  And that money was never mine.  I owed it before I’d even earned it.  Some of the language out there about being a slave to your lenders seems over the top to me, but that’s exactly what it is and maybe the exaggerated language is just what we need to work hard so we can be free.