Put Paid

When I was eighteen years old, my parents took me to the bank and set me up for college including getting me a credit card under my and my dad's name.  I was good about that card during those years, but once I was "out of the house" as it were, though the account didn't really change, I took on responsibility for it.

Back then, the limit on the thing was something like $500.

Back then, too, I made enough money that my eventual spouse and I had conversations such as, "Can we afford toilet paper this week?"

By the time we were married, I think I had already maxed out my paltry limit - and, over the past 19 years, I probably have used that card to pay for something fewer times than I could count on one hand.

Tonight:  I paid off that card, for good and all.

It was the only debt I carried not actually paying for anything - no house, no car, no financing on my windows.  Simply debt.  Over the years, I've come close to paying it off a few times:  but its extensiveness had become something of a benign tumor in my mind.  "At least I'm not in credit debt like 'everyone else' (in my mind)."  Certainly, it's incredibly common in our culture to carry credit debt of five digits, and even six.  Mine stayed in the 4-digit range.  But it stayed there for the better part of a GENERATION.

And it is gone.  100% of the debt on my plate today goes toward equity in my home, toward the improvements upon it.  I own no other credit cards which have ever been used (a Macy's one I filled out the app for, for that stupid discount they give you to do that; one my mom holds, which I would no sooner use than I'd borrow money from my nieces).

I have no credit card debt.  Dang, that's not bad.

Even as shameful as it is, how long it took me to say this.