Last Sunday I scrolled back through three and a half years of credit card statements until I found October 2021. There it all was: the pavilion deposit, sixty folding chairs, $312 of tablecloths and string lights, and the final payment to the barbecue caterer. Our wedding cost $4,800 all in, and about $1,900 of it went on this card.
We paid some of it down that first winter. Then came a vet bill, a couple of Christmases and a new battery for the truck, and the balance settled in between $1,800 and $2,400 like it owned the place. For three years we paid the minimum, about $66 a month, and the number barely moved. On March 18 it said $2,140.
The interest rate is 24.99 percent. I did the math one night and wished I hadn't. On a balance that size, that's about $45 a month in interest. Over three years we'd paid somewhere around $1,600 in interest on a wedding that cost $4,800. That's a third of the wedding all over again, for nothing.
The plan
Ten weeks, $220 every Friday. That's $2,200, which covers the $2,140 plus the interest that keeps ticking while we pay it down. If we stick to it, I figure the interest comes to around $50.
The money couldn't come from the CR-V. That $289 payment ends this month, and we already promised it to the house fund starting in April. I didn't want to break the first promise we ever wrote in the sheet. So here's where the $220 a week comes from:
- The $66 minimum we were already paying, about $15 a week.
- Our fun money, cut from $150 a month to $40 for these ten weeks. About $25 a week.
- No eating out. In February, Casey's pizza and the drive-thru added up to $96, so roughly $22 a week.
- The "everything else" spending. Since March 1, I've written down every swipe, and just doing that has cut it by about $100 a week.
- An extra Saturday shift for me every other week. That's about $118 after taxes, or $59 a week.
Add it up: $15 plus $25 plus $22 plus $100 plus $59 is $221. Close enough.
At Sunday dinner, my dad asked why we didn't just use our tax refund and be done in a day. It's a fair question, and my dad is good at those. The honest answer is that we'd already decided where the refund was going before this plan existed, and I wanted to know we could do it out of our regular paychecks. If we can't find $220 a week for ten weeks, that's something I need to know before we take on a mortgage.
Two Fridays in, the balance says $1,700 and change. I drew ten little boxes on the fridge calendar and colored in two. I'll update this post when the last one is filled in.
Update, May 31: the weeks that went sideways
It did not go in a straight line. Week four, the truck needed brake pads and rotors. Tyler did the work himself in the carport, but the parts were $164, so that Friday the card got $56. Week six was Kayla's birthday. She talked me into dinner in Columbia, and with gas it came to $58, so the card got $162.
That put us $222 behind with four weeks to go. Tyler fixed most of it. He picked up two Saturday overtime shifts in May, and we put $300 on the card each of those weeks instead of $220.
The last payment was $274. I sent it Friday night, the 23rd, and with Memorial Day on Monday it didn't post until Tuesday, May 27. I checked the balance three times that day. The third time, it said $0.00. Yesterday the statement closed, and it said zero too. I took a screenshot, and I'm not embarrassed about it.
All in, we paid $2,192 over ten weeks: the $2,140, plus $52 in interest. Compare that to the $1,600 or so we handed over in the three years before, paying the minimum and hoping.
We kept the card open. One small subscription bills to it each month and autopay pays the full statement, so it never carries a balance again. Some of that $220 a week came from overtime and skipped dinners out, so not all of it turns into savings now. But the $66 minimum is gone from the sheet for good, and so is the knot in my stomach every time the statement email showed up.
