Big news....

The company I work for has the option to "cash out" some of your PTO and receive the money as a type of extra bonus instead of taking the time off. 

The two conditions are
#1) You can only cash out your PTO twice per year.
#2) You must leave at least 40 hours in your PTO bank.

I had 140 hours in my PTO bank and received a check for 100 hours of extra pay.

I will be applying this roughly $2,500 to my American Express card reducing the $5,100 total balance to around $2,600 dollars or so.

This will make a big dent in my debt pay off.....

I have a plan in place to pay off the remaining $2600 possibly this month, but I want to make sure it goes through so stay tuned.

My current Situation and the progress I made over the last year.

As you can see since Dec 2013 I have paid off $5,000 in credit card debt going from $29,000 --> $24,258.

 

I have paid off over $10,000 in total debt reducing my total balance from $95,900 in December 2013 to $85,400 currently.

 

The dire debt situation and how I got myself into it.

I was divorced in October of 2011.

At that time I was making $14.50 an hour, I had a house that I owed roughly $66,000 dollars on but was worth only $30,000, and I had around $8,000 in credit card debt.

I graduated college in December 2011 and obtained a degree in Clinical Laboratory Science. The problem was that I needed to attend a post graduate 10 month unpaid clinical education at a local hospital to become certified and begin earning a good income.

The program was similar to medical school, requiring hours of studying every night and took 8 hours every day, five days per week. I could only work part time in order to pass the program so I had to rely on my credit cards in order to pay some bills, eat, and put gasoline in my car.

2012 was the year of debt accumulation... I could barely pay my bills working full time so during this year of schooling and living on my credit cards the debt grew.

The height of my debt was December of 2013:
I had an astonishing $29,000 in credit card debt & $95,900 in total debt!

I knew that I would never have wealth, or be finanically stable unless this debt was gone and it was in this last year that I began to change my life.

This blog will show my journey to pay off that debt, along with other debt I have. And also show what i am doing in order to build wealth and my plan to retire early.

Welcome to my personal debt and financial journey.

Some of you may know me from my blog Housingfear.blogspot.com where I predicted the financial meltdown and accurately called the bottom of the housing market.

This blog is about my journey to not only dig my way out of debt that most other people would have filed bankruptcy over, but to learn and understand money and investing. To use this knowledge to then become a millionaire.

This is not just a blog that will hopefully give you knowledge and enjoyment about finances, but I hope it will inspire you to see me rise from the ashes.

I will prove that a middle class income and a lot of determination can still lead to wealth even in todays political and economic climate. I spend most of my free time reading articles about debt and finance, so I figure why not share my story, and my quest with you. ...Hang on tight, because this is going to be something special.