HUGS Shannon! I know how stressful & hard debt is and how hard it is to leave a place you love! I moved from BC to SK (where DH & I are now), and every day I still miss BC. We moved for work too. DH was working a dead-end job at a telecommunications center, and now has a very good job drywalling/painting (with my dad).
Anyways, over the last 3 years, we've managed to get into debt, which is really stressing me out. We bought a car, bought a house, did lots of renos, and recently had our first baby. So I'm now a SAHM, and while I love it, it stresses me out to be living off DH's wage only. We weren't that careful with our money, and now are in debt.
Recently, we've been taking almost extreme measures to cut back & save. We have stopped eating out (we were eating out 2-3 times per week). No more "treats" (specialty coffees, no trips to the bakery - I was a sucker for it, no chocolate bars @ convenience stores when filling up the tank). We are trying to walk more to save the gas (fairly easy because we live in such a small town). I buy virtually nothing and DH is doing the same. It's bills only basically. Yeah, it sucks, but we are willing to do it to get out of debt.
One thing we did too was get rid of 2 credit cards. I had 1, DH had 1, and we had 1 together. Now we just have the joint one. We emptied all our cards (2 were over 2000, mine was over 1000) into a credit line from the bank, which will save us 12% per month on interest! We are pretty happy about that. A few times to save $$ we also switched CC and transfered the balance over, but only on the offers that had like 1.97% interest on balance transfers for 6 months to 1 year. It saved us loads of interest charges...
Another thing we did, which might sound silly, but works amazingly well is to save your toonies!!! We started to carry cash, and now when we get a toonie in change, we put it aside & put it in a savings jar at home. We can easily save about $500/year or more if we are really trying. We paid for our honeymoon that way. In 3 months we had saved almost $400 and went on a nice trip through the Kootenays in BC for 4 days.
HUGS again! I know its hard, but getting out of debt CAN be done! I hope you can come to a solution that makes all of you happy!!
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