I haven’t done an update on our credit-card debt free journey in quite a while. It’s been nearly 3 years since we first started our journey to becoming credit-card debt free and we paid off our first credit card debt in November 2014. We are now almost completely debt-free on the second credit card debt which was much, much higher and as a result, much, much more difficult to pay off. Yet, here we are now, two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom so we are nearly there! This is the final stretch!

The reason I’ve been a bit quiet about this on my blog is because I think we’d probably hit the debt-payment plateau over the last few months, financially as well as emotionally. We’d reached our maximum stretch. We’d cut down as much as we could and wherever we could (read more about How we reduced our monthly expenditure and 10 ways we save money everyday). There was nothing more to cut down on so that we could find extra room in our budget for additional payments. We made the same, steady, monotonous extra payments each and every month.

We were working as much as we could and there were literally no more extra hours left in the day, Monday to Friday, or the weekends, for us to earn extra money. While we haven’t lost heart, and we are still as focussed as we can be, we’d just flat-lined a bit. Now that we are two more months, or two more payments, away from credit-card debt freedom, it feels a bit surreal. I almost didn’t even want to write a blog post about it in case… well, in case, something went wrong.

Can we relax a bit now? I think so. There are going to be no more crazy working hours and working over the weekends, at least not for a while and certainly not for me. Working non-stop is not fun, especially when it carries on for a bit longer than what your body can take. I’ve been walking around exhausted for months now, and this has affected my health and general well-being. This month, for example, I got my second bout of flu in less than 3 weeks and the second time round I was literally ordered to stay in bed for several days (which I did) so that I can recover completely and get some of my energy back.

But despite hitting the debt payoff plateau, so to speak, we still made the same additional payments every month for the last few months and it’s now down to just two more of those payments, and at this point, it doesn’t even matter that we cannot increase those extra payments. What matters, and what sounds awfully good as I say it to myself, is that those two extra payments will get paid. Saying that to myself, I actually feel lighter. Happier. Less burdened. Freer. Not yet completely free but freer. I even sleep better, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

So what’s next for us? The first step I’m looking forward to is seeing a ZERO balance on the second credit card very, very soon. The second step I’m looking forward to even more is closing that account for good. And after that? All I can is – stay tuned, frugal friends…!

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Just the other day I read an interesting article We Earn Millions But Lose it to Debt. The most striking point the article presents is that American workers earn on average US$ 2 million in their lifetime, but lose 27% of this income to tax and a further 20% of this amount to debt, which is roughly US$ 400,000.00! This really seemed like an awful lot and it made me wonder exactly how these numbers and percentages would apply to South Africans, if at all. So I did a bit of research online and this is what I’ve found.

According to Statistics South Africa the average South African monthly gross wage in the first quarter of 2016 was R17,517.00. The average annual income before tax then comes to R293,600.00. If we take a person’s average working lifetime, from 22 to 65 years of age, and without taking any promotions, salary increases or inflation rate adjustments into account, the total amount of money an average South African worker would expect to earn in their lifetime would be R12,624,800.00 before tax.

In the current financial year, a person’s annual income from R0 – R188,000.00 is taxed 18% and from R188,000.00 to R293,600.00 is taxed at 26%. Again, taking no annual tax adjustments into account, a person’s lifetime income of 8,084,000.00 would then be taxed at 18% and R4,540,800.00 would be taxed at 26%, with a grand total of R1,958,928.00 that would be lost to tax in a person’s lifetime. This would leave the average South African worker with a total of R10,665,872.00 earned during their lifetime. On a positive note, we are all millionaires in the making!

But if we consider the statistics according to this article in the Rand Daily Mail,  that the average South African consumer and wage earner spends about 17% their after-tax income on risk protection services, 34% on household items and 49% on debt repayments each month, this means that the average South African would lose R5,226,277,28 of their life’s income to debt! At the current exchange rate, that would be roughly US$ 348,000.00 which is almost the same as the statistics provided for American workers. However, they would earn an average of US$ 2,000.000.00 in their lifetime which would be roughly R30,000,000.00 at the current exchange rate and roughly 3 times as much as their South African counterpart!

If the average South African worker were to invest 49% of their average monthly after tax income of R15,192.00, each month from the ages of 22 to 65, in a unit trust fund with an average annual rate of return of 12%, that person would actually have R104,837,249.41 to enjoy in their retirement according to this investment calculator http://www.liberty.co.za/support/tools-calculators/Pages/investment-calculator.aspx Even if this person were to invest 25% of their income of R15,192.00 each month for a period of 43 years they would still have R52,418,624.71 to enjoy when they retire.

These numbers certainly put monthly debt repayments into a whole new perspective for me. Does the true cost of debt really run into the millions in the course of a person’s lifetime?

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

He who understands it, earns it;

he who doesn’t, pays it.”

~Albert Einstein

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If you’ve read my posts Becoming Credit Card Free: Our Journey Part 1 and Part 2, you’ll know that we are on our way to becoming completely credit card free in just a few more months, if all goes according to plan. I cannot wait! And on that note, I wanted to share with you a few of our experiences on making minimum and extra payments on our credit card each month.

Most people I know have a debit order loaded on their cheque account so that they can pay the minimum balance due on their credit card, usually at the end of the month. Now let’s say your minimum amount due is R500.00 for the month of April. You budget and decide you are going to pay the R500.00 through your debit order and you can afford to pay an additional R600.00. So you make the extra payment of R600.00 to your credit card provider and wait for the debit order to go off for the month. But guess what? It doesn’t. Why? Well, the credit provider has decided that you have already paid the minimum payment due when you paid the R600.00. This has happened to us.

I first read about this on a personal finance blog which mentioned this very same issue that they had with one of their credit card providers in the UK. I didn’t think much of it at the time nor did it occur to me that this would be the case with our credit card provider. We had to phone the credit provider only to be told that this is exactly what they are doing now. I don’t know if this is the case with your particular credit card provider but it certainly is the case with ours. It’s something new that they have implemented. For you, as the consumer, this means that you would need to check if this applies to your credit card account as well so that you can plan accordingly.

If you don’t, then this is the scenario you can expect. Let’s go back to our numbers from above. Out of the R600.00 you’d paid thinking it was an ‘extra payment’, you would have paid your minimum amount due which is R500.00 and only R100.00 ‘extra’. Out of this R500.00 you would have paid roughly half that amount, R250.00, towards your principal debt and the other half of R250.00 towards interest and fees. So your principal debt would only decrease by R250.00 + R100.00 = R350.00. Had the R500.00 debit order gone off your cheque account as you thought it would, and you had paid an extra R600.00, this would mean that R250.00 would have been paid towards interest and fees and a total of R250.00 + R600.00 = R850.00 towards your principal debt. So your overall balance would have reduced by R850.00 and from that point on the interest accrued would have been calculated on the reduced total amount owing.

Bear in mind that interest on your credit card debt is calculated and accrued daily which means that the longer this higher balance sits in your credit card account, the higher the amount of interest that’s going to be calculated on each of those days. This will in turn increase the minimum amount due on your credit card at the end of that month. In our case, we had accrued more interest on a higher balance on each of the 3 days while we were waiting for the debit order to go through. At first we thought it was just a delay or a glitch in the system, which it turned out that it wasn’t. But had the debit order gone off on the due date, we would have accrued less interest and therefore paid less overall at the end of the month. We’ve not made that same mistake since, I’m happy to say.

And if you are making extra credit card payments, like we are, I hope you are considering using EFT to do that which involves no additional banking fees. We’ve sometimes had to use the ATM machine for payments and this has incurred extra banking charges which comes straight out of our pockets! I would get so mad afterwards just looking at the bank statements. Are those huge amounts of interest we pay to credit card providers not enough? Do they have to take that extra R10 or R20 or R30 or whatever the case may be? Is that meant to be a form of punishment for being responsible and making extra payments each month towards your credit card? It certainly felt like punishment to me so we avoid ATM machine deposits as much as possible.

To add insult to injury, so to speak, just a couple of weeks ago we received a phone-call from this particular credit card provider. They called to offer us an ‘increase in our credit card limit’. It took us all of half a second to say – NO! Thank you but NO, thank you! Later on in the day, my husband and I were discussing the phone call and we just couldn’t help but laugh! They couldn’t have called at a worse time – for them – to offer us an ‘increase in our credit card limit’. Tough luck. We’ve had enough of making someone else richer and ourselves all the poorer.

Do you have any advice for making the most of minimum and extra payments on your credit card? I’d love to hear your ideas! Please leave me a comment below.

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Our very first credit card was paid off in full and the account closed in November 2014 (you can read more about our journey here). This was a small victory for us but a victory nonetheless! We just couldn’t be happier. We celebrated the day we closed that account and immediately started talking about paying off the balance on our second credit card. The balance we had remaining on that card, although high, was not very high and we felt that, with regular extra payments each month, no matter how small, we would soon be rid of that debt too.

Fast forward to the first half of 2015 and things were not looking good for us. Due to unexpected medical expenses as well as business-related expenses, the balance on the credit card had tripled; just ballooned, almost over-night it seemed. To make matters worse, there was no wiggle room in our budget during that time, and this would continue well into the year due to recurring medical expenses as well as business-related expenses each and every month. Eventually, we were exhausted – physically, mentally, emotionally and financially. Last year was a tough year for us. Although I don’t quite remember when we’d hit rock-bottom, all I know is that we did. And that lowest point was our turning point once again, as clichéd as that may sound. We realised that we had to get up and get moving in the right direction once again.

Fast forward another couple of months, and we’d tightened our already tight budget even more so that we could get back on track with extra credit card payments each month – whatever we could, whenever we could. We spent very little over the holidays simply because there just wasn’t much to spend. It was an all-round tough year. Yet we still managed to buy nice and thoughtful Christmas presents for all our loved ones, host a lovely Christmas lunch for a few family members and enjoy our time off, despite everything (read about Christmas and New Year frugal ideas here). We got through the two toughest months of the year – December and January – without incurring any additional debt for any of our household expenses. We usually budget for these two months very carefully so we don’t normally experience shortfalls but considering what a year we’d had, I was wondering if we’d make it. And we did.

We carried on budgeting, crunching numbers day in, day out, tightening up on whatever we could (read about how we saved on our monthly expenses here). Additionally, we made a decision to go through stuff that we have around the house and sell – an extra this, an extra that but generally items that we don’t really use often, or don’t use at all, or just don’t like or have outgrown, etc. This took us a while and I remember, at the time, a well-meaning friend asked me why I was even bothering to sell anything because I “wasn’t going to get much anyway so I might as well keep it”. While it may be true that we tend to pay a lot for brand new things sometimes only to end up selling them a year or two later for half the price, or even less than that, I realised that I was looking at the whole situation differently. The item has been paid for already, that money is gone, but I can certainly think about selling the item and getting some new money to put towards extra credit card payments. Every little Rand I got, and could put towards the credit card debt, meant that we wouldn’t be paying 18% or 20% interest on each one of those Rands.

So if this is something you are thinking about doing, then I can tell you with certainty that those Rands do add up and they do make a difference. It will take a bit of effort and thought and planning, not only going through your things and deciding what to sell, but also selling those items. We’ve pretty much done it all: we’ve sold privately, we’ve used Facebook groups, we’ve taken items to Pawn Shops (several of them, actually), we’ve taken stuff to flea markets, we’ve sold to Cash Converters. It all works. If one shop doesn’t want your items, try another one, or two, and someone will eventually take those items off your hands. It really is as they say: one’s man trash is another man’s treasure. And the items that you decide to sell don’t even have to be big ticket items – most of what we had were small things that we didn’t really need. The important thing is that the amounts you do get will add up to a nice chunk of change which you can then apply towards your extra credit card payments straightaway.

In addition to this, I’ve also started doing some extra (paid) work over the weekends. This is not always available through my workplace but on the few occasions that it was offered to employees, I volunteered. It is, after all, a bit of extra money at the end of the month and every bit helps as we can always use that extra money to put towards repaying our credit card debt. While we are not out of the woods just yet, the amount we owe on the second credit card has reduced. It is now half the amount it was when we started paying down the balance. Woohoo! Just saying this fills me with absolute joy. While we still have a good few months ahead of us, the progress we are making keeps us motivated to pay off our credit card debt. I cannot wait to fast forward over the next couple of months.

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Just as I was starting to think things were looking good for us this month, and we were on track financially, well, guess who decided to come pay us a visit? Murphy, of course. That one unwelcome visitor none of us want to see standing at the door! Not at any time of the month but especially not when everything had already been budgeted for. But, there he was, Murphy, knocking persistently, several days in a row. In fact, he’s had quite a busy week on our doorstep!

Who is Murphy?

It all started when I got home from work last week and we realised that one of my fog lights had been smashed in. I have no idea how this had actually happened so I can only assume that someone must have smashed into it at some parking lot or the other during the week and I just hadn’t noticed. I’d gone to work, I’d been to the shops and it could have happened anywhere really while the car was left unattended. I waited patiently for Monday to come so that we could phone around. I didn’t want us to have to claim from insurance for something which seemed so small and easily replaceable. Well, after the first phone call I realised that we were looking at over R4,000.00 for a brand new fog light! I nearly fell off my chair. It was time to start phoning around some more. Eventually, we managed to find a second-hand spares shop which had just the fog light we were looking for. The price, including VAT, was R700.00, which was quite a difference!

Now, in between all of this, over the weekend in fact, I had prepared a baked meal for us to go into the oven. Just as I’d switched the oven on and was waiting patiently for it to heat up, I realised that it was well over half an hour and the oven was really only lukewarm! Five minutes later and hubby to the rescue, we realised that the bottom heating element in the oven had died. That was another phone call we had to make on Monday but, I’m happy to say that we did manage to find yet another spares place which had just the element in stock, and brand new too. Thankfully, this one cost us only R80.00! Plus, of course, the petrol we had to spend to go and fetch it but I suppose paying for an electrician’s call-out, and having someone else source the element for us, would have cost us a whole lot more. There are truly times when I’m so, so grateful that I’m married to someone who is so handy around the house!

And just as we were phoning around, I received an SMS on my phone informing me that I’d gone over 50% of my voluntary call limit. There was just so much going on that day that I didn’t really think much of it at the time. It was only much later in the day that I remembered the SMS. I honestly thought it was a mistake. Using my cell phone on a budget, I do keep track of how many phone calls I make, how much data I use, etc. and I suddenly realised: I couldn’t have made more than 5 minutes’ worth of phone calls in the past week and so I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near my limit, let alone over the limit. My limit, by the way, is R100.00 over and above the 120 minutes I have available to use on my plan. So I decided to give my service provider a call to find out what exactly is going on.

Over almost an hour on the phone later, I had a much clearer picture of what was actually happening. It turns out that I had been subscribed to a WASP service, without my knowledge or permission; I was, in fact, subscribed to an SMS dating service of some kind! I was not happy to hear that. Even more when I got told that this subscription service had taken R55.00 from me in February, R100.00 in March and R65.00 for the month of April, which brings it to a total of R220.00. While this may not seem like a lot nowadays, it is still money which was, to put it bluntly, stolen from me. I have since lodged a complaint with WASPA, the association which deals with situations like these. It’s difficult to say at this point whether or not this amount will ever be refunded to me but I can only hope that it just might be. *Update: this amount has now been refunded to me. Very pleased about that!

Roll on Tuesday night and our washing machine, which we bought about a year and a half ago, brand new, all of a sudden starts making all sorts of strange, unhealthy noises and producing sparks and fireworks in the middle of a spin cycle! Well, that was the end of that wash cycle. The motor had just died. And honestly, I didn’t see that one coming so soon, at not even two years old! After a brief moment of panic, the first thing I did was go digging for the receipt, which was there alright. I was relieved when we phoned the shop the next day and were told that the appliance was still under warranty from the manufacturer. A technician was booked to come and have a look and sure enough, the motor had died but was going to be replaced, and we didn’t have to pay a thing. Yay! That’s a little bit of a happy ending after a week-long visit from Murphy!

Dave Ramsey’s take on how to Kick Murphy Out with an Emergency Fund

After a long and exhausting week, we said goodbye to Murphy. For now. I am so grateful that we didn’t have to use any debt to pay for Murphy’s week-long stay with us; in fact, that felt so good. While we may not be out of the woods just yet we are getting there.

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If you are on a journey to becoming debt free, and you’re finding it difficult to stay motivated during the long months ahead as you watch the balance go down very slowly in spite of all those extra payments you’ve been making each month, you are not alone. Staying motivated was probably the most difficult part on our journey of becoming credit card free and especially for me, this is something I struggled with very often.

Whatever the circumstances and whatever the reasons one may have for accumulating credit card debt in the first place, the bottom line is that one has used money they didn’t have at the time but assumed they would have the same amount, and more, to pay it all off later. Strangely enough this is not something one thinks about at the time of making a purchase or withdrawing cash on a credit card – I know we certainly didn’t. And I also know that situations can be dire – sometimes one has no choice but to use a credit card. For a lot of people, credit card debt doesn’t come from shopping sprees and lavish purchases but rather, from genuine need. This is what makes credit card debt such a burden.

Paying the minimum payment due each month, however, doesn’t really put a dent into any debt – the bulk of what we end up paying with our hard earned cash goes towards interest and fees and charges to the lender. That’s why it’s so hard to pay off any kind of debt with just the minimum monthly payments. If you plug in the amount you owe on a credit card into any online debt calculator along with your minimum monthly payments you would see how long it would actually take you to pay off your credit card debt – in many cases, this would take years and you would end up paying double the amount you originally borrowed, if not more. For us, our one credit card would have taken us 8 years to pay off with just the minimum payments and the other one, well, actually 18 years, believe it or not. Shocking, isn’t it?

Now imagine if you actually had your credit card debt hanging about for all those years. Wouldn’t you get sick and tired of having to pay and pay and pay only to see the balance on your credit card go down just a little bit each month? That’s sure to destroy anyone’s motivation along the way. Even with the extra amounts we were putting towards credit card payments each month, we still became discouraged more often than not. Why? Because it still took such a long time. Even a year can seem a pretty long time. And all the while you’re busy paying off credit card debt, life still happens. Murphy does indeed come knocking on your door and expect you to find even more money to pay for burst geysers and punctured tyres and doctor’s visits.

Eventually all you want to do is – give up, forget the whole thing and go back to this state of blissful ignorance before you started paying off your credit card debt and before you became so obsessed with paying down the balance. This was the time when you kind of knew you had credit card debt but you were still hoping for that lucky break in life – perhaps a raise at work, a big bonus, an inheritance or a great lotto win – which would help you wipe out that whole lot of debt in an instant! Sadly, for many of us, this kind of an instant fix never comes and we have no choice but to simply trudge along. If you’re one of the lucky few and you managed to wipe out your credit card debt in one or two very large payments, then consider yourself very lucky indeed.

Because here’s the thing: once you start paying down your credit card debt you know there is no going back to the way things used to be before. You know you have to pay off your debt and so you keep traipsing along. Some months you would be able to put more towards your debt while there will always be those months where you just cannot put that much extra towards the repayment. It’s at those low, low moments that I always said to myself – think about how far you still have to go but never forget how far you’ve come.

I kept a visual reminder of this in a very simple table with the outstanding balance and all the payments we’d made. Each time I would start to feel discouraged about our situation, I would go back to this table, look at our starting balance and how much progress we’d made thus far. So even if we’d only managed to make a small extra payment that month, let’s say R500, I reminded myself that it’s R500 that we wouldn’t be paying interest on. There’s definitely some comfort in just looking at the balance going down, and not going back up. This actually motivated me to stay on track, not make any extra purchases or payments on that credit card and just keep moving.

I also kept reading personal finance blogs during this time. I probably searched for ‘get out of debt’ online at least a million times and I’m hardly exaggerating here. That’s pretty much all the bedtime reading my husband and I did for a very long time. We found inspiration and courage in other people’s stories of success in surmounting very large amounts of credit card and other debt, in fact, much larger debts than ours. The truth is, I just needed to hear that being debt-free is possible, and to stop doubting ourselves into thinking that it was impossible and that it will never happen for us.

I also tried my hardest to keep focussed on our goal of becoming credit card free. At one point all I could think about was seeing that light finally shine at the end of a long and dreary tunnel that we’d been fumbling in for so long. I knew that there were possibilities out there, waiting for us, and that’s really all I wanted – a possibility, a chance at a very different life once there was no more credit card debt hanging around our necks. Staying focussed wasn’t always easy but I held onto our goals and wanted us to be debt free so much that this was the biggest motivator of them all. At least for me.

If you are on a journey to becoming debt-free, what do you do stay motivated?

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Proverbs 22:7 ‘The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a slave to the lender.’

Becoming credit card free and living life more frugally hasn’t been an easy journey for us. But the option of living life as borrowers, ‘servants to the lender’ and to credit card debt, can’t feel that great either, right? It certainly didn’t feel that great for us. Despite the hardships we faced, we have learnt so much from our mistakes over the last few years and I feel it in my heart that we have become stronger in faith and in character.

We got our first credit card years ago out of absolute ignorance, as unbelievable as that sounds. And yes, we did use it. We also got a second card a few months later. Why? Well, we didn’t apply for the second card: it was offered to us and we accepted it. We knew that interest would accrue on the balances owed but we had no idea how much or how long it would actually take to pay off balances on credit cards by paying the minimum balance each month. We never really bothered to look at the statements much and we continued to rely on the card for emergencies.

At the time, the car we had was really not the most reliable one. It was old and not in the best of shape at all. It pretty much needed spare parts, repairs and towing almost every single month. This was a huge drain on our finances, which we didn’t have. Yes, we owned the car but it was draining us financially every couple of weeks. As a result of that, we didn’t have enough money for a lot of other necessities so we had to resort to using the credit cards, oblivious to the horrendous amount of interest we would be paying with just the minimum repayments at the end of each month. By the time we managed to sell that car, and buy something a bit more reliable, but still second hand, we had credit card debt which we had to face.

We carried on paying the minimum balances each month, all the while thinking very naively that paying the minimum due each month would pretty soon make a dent in the balances we owed. After about 14 months or so, we got an absolute fright when we realised that after all those months of paying and paying, the remaining balance had hardly gone down! In fact, what had gone down was so small that it was laughable! We were horrified. In hindsight, we really were too young and so very naïve. Yes, we should have checked the statements more often and yes, we should have asked around for advice or at least read up a bit about it online. That moment was a real wake up call for us. Experience really is the best teacher, as they say.

And that’s when we started learning a bit more about how credit cards really work. We used an online debt repayment calculator, only to find out to our horror that paying the minimum balance on the one credit card meant that it would have taken us something like 8 years to pay off the total amount, with just about double the amount in interest alone. The second credit card would have taken a lot longer than that; in fact, so much longer that even now when I think about it, I shudder at the thought – 18 years.

It was then that we began to educate ourselves. We read lots of blogs with people’s personal experiences, watched a whole lot of videos online, read up on what financial experts had to say about saving money as well as getting out of debt. It took us a long time to see our situation for what it was. Both my husband and I really liked what Dave Ramsey had to say about the 7 Baby Steps to getting out of debt.

NOTE: I am not affiliated to Dave Ramsey or his products in any way. This blog post simply recounts the details of our personal journey to becoming credit-card free and is not intended to replace Dave Ramsey’s financial coaching or products or courses offered by the Financial Peace University in any way. You can read about Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps here and about Financial Peace University here.

So we thought we would give that a try. Moving on from step 1, which was setting up a very small emergency fund, we then started paying off the first credit card balance. We paid as much as we could over and above the minimum amount due at the end of the month. We scrimped and saved. We changed our shopping habits (you can read about how I save money on each month here and here. We sold pretty much whatever we had around the house that we weren’t really using. We also learnt, month by month, how to be more frugal in our lives and how to cut down on our monthly expenditure (read about how we did that in my post here).

All of this, and all at once, was a lot of hard work. It was exhausting. It was heart-wrenching at times. We lost hope and motivation so often along the way. Paying off credit card debt was HARD. But we wanted to be free. That was our goal. Large amounts owed on a credit card can be very daunting and the months ahead can seem very long. They certainly felt like that for us. But in spite of that, I can remember even now the biggest smiles on our faces each time we made an additional payment just so that we could check our balance and see the progress we were making! That’s what kept us going, I think (you can read more about how we stayed motivated while paying off credit card debt here).

We were absolutely overjoyed when we managed to pay off the full balance owed on the first credit card in just a year. I say ‘just’ a year because depending on how much debt a person has to deal with, it could take a lot longer than that. We closed that credit card account literally the day after the last payment went in. We just couldn’t wait a second longer to be rid of at least that one chain around our necks. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to express in words how elated we were that day! It’s certainly a day neither my husband nor I will forget. We were convinced we could even breathe easier from that moment on. It was a small victory but it was a victory for us nonetheless.

Looking back at our journey of paying off our very first credit card, I realise that it was a lesson well worth learning for us. We needed more discipline in certain aspects of our lives: discipline with finances in general, our spending habits, and learning how to be less wasteful with our resources. But, you might be wondering: whatever happened to the second credit card?

Becoming credit Card Free: Our Journey Part 2

For the time being, if you find yourself on a similar journey of paying off credit card debt in South Africa, I would love to connect with you so please leave me a comment below.

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