Category: Debt Free Stories

Today’s debt free story is from Jessica Fisher (of Life as Mom and Good Cheap Eats fame) who’s a mom to six.

She and her husband paid off $18,000 in consumer debt, and think that living the debt-free life now is amazing. Here’s their story.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’m a writer by nature and by profession. It’s something that I’ve always loved to do. I think best on paper. My husband and I have been married for over 20 years and have six children aged from 6 to 17. I’ve homeschooled all the kids since birth. The first has made it into college, so the experiment is working! We live in San Diego and love it. I was raised in California and can’t imagine ever living elsewhere.
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Some debt stories are SO inspiring. But they can be hard to relate to. If you’ve ever thought “Wow, that’s amazing, but how is that even possible?” this debt free story is for you.

So let me confess:

It took me decades to get out of debt, if you count from the very first moment I decided I both hated debt and wanted to see it gone.

Why did it take me so long?

Not because I didn’t know how, or because I had some obscene amount of debt or some kind of extenuating circumstances that kept me in debt. No, I was pretty normal.

I knew how to get out of debt all along.

The process boils down to this: Quit borrowing money. Pay back what I already borrowed. Don’t buy things unless I already have the money in my hot little hands.

It’s simple, right? So why the long journey?
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Many years ago, I was a newly single mom with one young son and a whole lot of debt.

My only paid-for asset was a twelve year old car that I’d just blown the engine on. I worked 20 or so miles from home, and had no way to get there for the foreseeable future.

That’s when it hit me: no one else was going to fix my life.

The vow

It was up to me to fix things, and by God I was going to do it. Starting with my finances.

And I was not going to borrow money to do it.

That vow was the first step toward eventually becoming completely debt free — house and everything — something I never would have believed possible at the time.

But my husband of 10 years and I did exactly that a few years ago.
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(Zina Kumok writes about paying off $28,000 worth of student loans in three years. She has been featured in Time, RetailMeNot, and Daily Worth. You can read her blog, Conscious Coins, to get more advice on budgeting, saving and paying off debt.)

When I was in school, I knew I was racking up thousands in student loans. But so were all my friends. We’d joke about it and mention it casually, but no one ever worried about paying them back. Even I, a journalism major, didn’t wonder how my reporter salary would allow me to pay back all my loans and live like I was still in college.

It was only when I started my first job, right before the six-month grace period on my loans ended, that I realized how little I made. After paying all my bills and saving for an emergency fund, I only had enough to make the minimum $350 payment on my student loans.
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