Credit card debt is at record levels. U.S. consumers have nearly $1.3 trillion in credit card debt.
That’s a head-spinning number, but you know the impact of it if you’re overwhelmed and struggling to pay your own credit card bills.
But even if it seems impossible, you can turn it around. Melissa John Giusti of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, did it.
When Giusti graduated from law school, she got a low-paying first job and was saddled with student loan debt.
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“I think that just kind of was a catalyst for me of, just using my credit card to pay off things because I didn't really have the cash to do it,” said Giusti.
“I ended up maxing out all of my credit cards at once. And then once that happened, I couldn't dig out from underneath that...it's overwhelming.”
Giusti had $70,000 in credit card debt. Over the years her salary increased, and she made minimum credit card payments, but she wasn’t making a dent in it.
“I went to see a financial advisor, and the financial advisor said to me, point blank, you make over $100,000 and you’re drowning in debt right now, you’re drowning,” she remembers. “And that was sort of a wakeup call to me.”
The financial advisor referred her to Money Management International, a nonprofit credit counseling service.
MMI negotiated low-interest rates on her credit cards and organized her debt into one monthly payment.
She began to chip away at it and was forced to change her spending habits.
“When they take your credit cards away …and you’re spending cash, you do say to yourself, I don’t have any cash in my pocket, so I’m going to make spaghetti tonight,” she says.
“I think another thing that I learned to do was to say no to my friends when they were going out to eat.”
Giusti, who recently bought a house, says she quickly got into the habit of tracking her spending and sticking to a budget. She paid off her credit card debt in three years, and now regularly puts money into a savings account.
She has one travel rewards credit card that she pays off every month.
“I log into my credit card account every day so I can see what I spent yesterday and I make note of that,” she says. “I have a little budgeting journal that I enter in how much money I spent the previous day…I equate it to like a weight loss program where they make you step on the scale every day so that you are monitoring, like how your weight is fluctuating. It’s the same type of thing. I’m noticing how my money is fluctuating and where it’s going and what I’m spending it on.”
Giusti says her experience with MMI was life-changing and she hopes her story will inspire others to take action.
How does it feel to have crawled out from under $70,000 worth of debt?
“The freedom that you feel when you don’t have that debt on your shoulders anymore. It’s really hard to describe, but I was able to buy this house,” she says. “I was able to not freak out every time my credit card payment was due…the freedom of that, it’s just really indescribable.”
If you do enter into a debt management plan with MMI, there are some nominal client fees that go along with that, an average of $24 a month, but that is offset by interest savings.
You can get more information on Money Management International here: https://www.moneymanagement.org/
