Excuses

The big thing we’re focusing on now is our finances. We’re over $67,000 in debt not counting our mortgage – which is over $420,000. We were previously unintentional landlords to a townhouse, and we had to spend money to get rid of it.

At about the same time, our heat pump died. We lived without heat or A/C for 3 months (luckily, it was fall), but we finally had to buy a new heat pump. I thought we could handle another few months, but with winter looming, and the previous 2 winters being horrible – Dad insisted we replace the heat pump. Turns out, we barely used the wood stove, and winter was *very* mild after the blizzards we’d had previously, but Dad enjoyed the heat pump (and I enjoyed the lowered electric bills). We ended up taking out a line of credit from our bank to pay for the heat pump and the money we had to bring to closing: $17,500.

In May, my 9 year old car with 178k miles on it decided to destroy the A/C compressor – and take out the serpentine belt at the same time. We were stranded in the middle of nowhere (luckily without Daughter Person), and an estimated $3200 in repairs – we bought a new car. We had been looking at a larger one anyway – to haul Daughter Person’s “stuff” – and with the repairs being more than the car was worth and the hybrid battery pack going to need replacing in about 20k miles, we donated it.

All in all, we ended up with more debt on top of what we already had. Luckily, the car was 0%, and the line of credit was “only” 8.75%, but still, more money we didn’t really want to borrow.

We just paid off a credit card that had at it’s peak $24,500 (not included in the total above) – it took us 6 months. Now, we’re attacking the line of credit.

We’re well on our way to paying off the line of credit by next February (maybe December?), but that’s only the first of a few debts we need to pay off.

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