A couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of Master Your Card’s readers - a fellow from St. Louis by the name of Tom Wells. I found him very well spoken and eloquent, and what he had to say really inspired me. I wrote him back almost immediately and we’ve been speaking with each other on a regular basis ever since.

After a bit of cajoling, I managed to convince him to write a few guest posts here on MYC, the first of which will begin tomorrow. In the meantime, he has graciously allowed me to post the email that started off our correspondence. I hope you find it as inspiring as I did!

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Here I am turning 42 and it seems like money is tighter now than it was when I was 22.

Between the house payment, the car payment, paying for our daughters first year in college (and trying like crazy to be able to afford to send our son to college when he graduates next year), and the stack of credit card bills we have to pay each month, I sometimes wonder if we are going to make ends meet.

In many ways, I realize that most of this is my own doing. After all, credit was so easy to come by – so we spent, spent, spent like there was no tomorrow! Now we are finding out that tomorrow has finally arrived!

Before I get too far along in my story, let me introduce myself. My name is Tom Wells and I live in a suburb of St. Louis, MO. We have a modest house and 2 kids, the eldest, Jan, is attending college this year about 150 miles away. Our younger son, Jacob, is a junior and will be going off to college in about a year and a half. I work as a research chemist for a large chemical company here and my wife is a middle school teacher. We aren’t poor by any means, after all last year my wife and I brought home a little under $85,000 total. I guess you could say we are your typical suburban family.

Yet, like so many people, we are struggling to make ends meet. About two months ago we sat down and took a good hard look at our finances. What we saw scared us!

House Payment: $900 per month
Car Payment: $350 per month
Tuition: $450 per month
Insurance: $300 per month
Credit Card Debt: $800 per month
Utility Bills/Cell/Cable: $300 per month

That’s over $3,100 per month – and that doesn’t include groceries, entertainment, unexpected repairs or clothing and other necessities of life.

Like I said, what we saw scared us and we knew that we had to do something. You can see our credit card payments per month are nearly the same as our house payment! So we decided we had to do something – and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but few things in life worth doing are ever easy. We decided we had to get our finances under control – especially our credit card debt. In fact, we resolved to get all of our debt under control once and for all.

If you are like us and want to get out of this endless debt cycle, and living month to month, then I hope you will find some solace in the fact that you are not alone. Together we can get out from under this mountain of crushing debt once and for all!

Yours,

Tom