Buying a house was the first step to a $58,000 debt hole that Michael B. is just now crawling out of.
Michael and his wife were debt-free a decade ago when they moved to rural southern Oregon to save money. Then they bought a house – and just a few years later, they were $58,000 in debt. Even worse, Michael isn’t exactly sure how it happened.
“It was an emergency here, let’s take a trip there, I can pay this back later,” Michael recalls. “Then everything just starts to stack up. It just spirals out of control, and that’s where I found myself.”
The slow descent into debt
If Michael had to pick a moment when things really turned, it was when his wife was laid off as a graphic designer. It lasted only a few months before she found another job, “but in that interim, it’s just more expensive to live.”
Michael is a food and restaurant manager at a golf resort. It’s a “decent income,” he says. “Good eats and free golf. It’s great.”
But even his wife’s short layoff wasn’t enough to change the couple’s spending, because they were still scraping by.
“We were paying just the minimums on everything – and there were a lot of them,” Michael says. Still, “We were comfortable paying them. Our credit score wasn’t bad, you know? But we were sitting there with all of this debt thinking, ‘How come we don’t go on vacations? How come we haven’t bought a new car in seven years?’”
Eventually, Michael began to wonder…
Wow, there’s thousands of dollars that are going towards realistically nothing every month because you’re just sitting in the same boat that you were the month.
That’s when he decided to get out of the boat.
Making the Consolidated call
Michael thought it would be simple to find debt relief. Simply type “debt relief” into Google, right?
“Yeah, sure,” Michael says sarcastically. “On Google, everyone is advertising because they want to quote-help-unquote.”
When he found Consolidated Credit, it appealed to him.
“What really struck my interest was that it’s a nonprofit,” he says. And when he spoke to a certified credit counselor, he was impressed.
“I ended up being pleasantly surprised,” Michael says. “I really didn’t think there was a service out there like that.”
Michael still has 18 months left on a Debt Management Program before he’s completely debt-free.
It’s working. You know, I get updates from my creditors saying, “This bill’s been paid this month.” And that’s satisfying. You know, I never wanted to file bankruptcy or anything like that. I’m really stoked to be able to move on – putting a bunch of that money into retirement funds and things like that.”
And when he graduates? He’s taking his wife overseas.
“We want to take a trip to Europe to celebrate!”
Michael B. paid off his credit cards and celebrated with a dream trip to Europe. Ready to start your own debt-free journey? Call Consolidated Credit today.
