My Debt Blog

It seems every time I turn on the news, look at a paper, or check a news website, recession comes up more frequently than anything else. By definition a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, which hasn’t happened yet. We could be in one right now, but I’m not going to go as far as labeling it yet. So if we’re not in a recession, what are we experiencing? It’s a simple slowdown of the economy as a result of some very major blows to some markets.

What makes it even worse is the rate of inflation that we do feel. Most people have a relatively fixed income, same thing from month to month. When the basic expenses like food and gas are going up, the average individual will feel that more than the overall effect of a recession. In my opinion the greater threat to a slow economy is inflation, not recession.

So what can we do to try to reduce expenses. Here’s what we’re currently doing:

1. Gas - We have been carpooling to get to work which saves a few fillups per month.
2. Heating/Cooling - Now that the weather is starting to come back, we will have some time where we won’t need to use the heat or AC.
3. Food - Eating out less and bringing lunch from home really helps save money.
4. Entertainment - Finding the cheap or free things is great. We go to wine tasting on Saturday afternoons and experience the finer things for an hour at no cost!
5. Work Out - We’re going back to the gym again and getting in shape. Even though there’s a membership for this, the benefit is longer life span and reduced medical costs.

We’re also able to reduce monthly expenses by paying off credit cards. If everything goes as planned we’ll be down to only 2 cards each, around 14k remaining in credit card debt combined. I would like to get that number under 10k before the end of the year. To accomplish this it would take $500 a month for 8 months to wipe out 4k. I plan to work on the blog to get some more debt meters and where we stand on getting things paid off.

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