Three years of debt reduction

Today marks the third anniversary of my beginning this blog and my debt reduction journey. It's been a tough year financially: S and I made an expensive move, transitioned to one income, have been investing in his business, and racked up some more medical debt. All told we increased our debt a little over $1,600 in the past year. I've been trying to stay the course and see the positives in the setbacks we've had over the last year and remind myself that we will get back on track. 

Although debt reduction did not happen here are some of the more positive things that did occur in our financial world:

• We've made a transition to one income and aren't starving, deprived, or destitute. Making the leap to one income to allow S the opportunity to restart his ceramics business and stay home with our boys was a major hurdle this past year. I had major anxiety that we wouldn’t be able to make it work, that we wouldn’t be able or willing to make the sacrifices we would need to make in order for it to work. I was worried that ultimately the boys would end up back in some cut-rate daycare and S would be forced to abandon his dream and take some minimum wage dead end job just to make ends meet. Fortunately, we have made the adjustment relatively well and have been living on one salary without feeling too deprived with all the cuts we have had to make although it has added to the halt in debt reduction and increased debt.
• S’ business is fully funded and ready to launch. S has been working diligently on getting his business back up and running, which required a significant amount of our discretionary funds that otherwise would have gone into debt reduction or at least not accruing the new debt.  But now the business is fully funded and is going to be “launched” right before the holiday shopping season. We have high hopes that the business will be able to support itself in its infancy and eventually will bring in a profit.  In the meantime, now that the biggest hurdle is almost over S has been talking about getting an evening/ weekend job to bring in some extra income but still be able to be with the boys during the day.
• We should see a reduction in our taxes this year from the moving expenses which were not covered by my employer as well as the business investments. Although any tax return wouldn’t happen until early next year, it’s still on the horizon and can go towards debt reduction.

The road ahead is going to be tough as we still have a ton of debt to tackle but I'm hopeful that the last of the debt increases are behind us and we will start making headway on debt reduction again.