Debt-free and Dancing

A small celebration today. Not on the move, which I'll try to write about perhaps this weekend. But on being debt-free.

A goal since 2000 that I wished on, worked towards, danced at weekly Sweat Your Prayers™ with pain and wish for deliverance, was to be debt-free.

When I married my net worth was half a million; when I left the marriage 12 years later, I was a quarter of a million dollars in debt, largely due to my husband's spending habits (sports car, high speed boat, buying a cottage that had to have the most expensive finishing, paying off his visa year after year, itself largely composed of repair bills for the car and boat, and so on, I'm not saying it wasn't a fun ride but someone had to pay the toll). It was all rolled into a mortgage on my house, which he walked away from, not offering one cent on paying off that debt, a house I had originally owned outright. So I rented the basement, gave up my study/bedroom on the top floor and rented that, slept in my daughter's room, and continued on for 6 years, until I couldn't any more. My monthly payments were astronomical in comparison to my income. I sold my house, making almost no profit. With the money I bought computer equipment for my kids and I mostly, and financed a move to Vancouver and paid one year's rent on a house there.

After that year was up I had problems finding full time work, which I've blogged about, so accrued some debts, but tiny ones in comparison to where I'd been.

I'm happy to say that as of today I am free of debt to any institutions I owed money to. There are some debts to individuals and to family still, but the larger stuff is gone.

It's taken an extreme amount of effort to get to this point, now nine years after my marriage ended. But I've done it. I am proud of myself!

No, no money left over to go out and celebrate being debt-free to any institutions or companies. That's not the point. I'm doing an inner dance, and singing through today. The personal debts, the way I've been helped out, I now know will also get paid back. This is possible, today is living proof that it is. I gave up my credit card in the late 80s; my husband didn't. But then I gave him up. And slowly on almost no income I've managed to get back to a balance of 0, and now see that it's possible to again build equity. Maybe not all the way back to where I was before marrying, but somewhere.



Postscript: Cripes, yes I was debt-free after selling my beloved house, my home, but I was still basing my life on projections in the future - a year of writing, then a full-time job. It didn't materialize. I feel quite stabilized now in that I'm living in meagre surroundings but I can afford this. In the here and now. I'm not living 'on projections' (which I also did all through the married years). Is this called facing reality?

Whatever it is, it feels pretty darn good.

Postscript2: Do I regret marrying him? Look at my two children, just look at them. Well, this is the public internet and you can't. But if you could, you'd know that's not a relevant question.

No regrets. Only why was it at nearly the end of the marriage when I found out his family has a history of doing this to wives? His grandfather blew through his grandmother's fortune, philandering on her, even bringing his lovers into the house when she was there, and left her penniless, something his father grew up with with a lot of anger (he died just after we were married and was ill for some time before that, so I didn't hear the stories). And who knows of the generations before that. There was precedence. None of his wealthy family seemed to think what happened to me meant anything; I guess it was old hat to them. Now that's where I should have been more cognizant. I would have if it had been a history of violence towards women or children, obviously, but a history of financial abuse of wives? You'd hardly have thought it possible, given the patristic economic structure of past centuries... surely there's a story here of generations of a family.