So, I don't normally post about my personal business on the forum, but I have kinda gotten myself into a financial problem here and just wanted to get some general opinions about my potential course of action. I'm just going to speak in general terms here without going into the specific dollar amounts.
Just for the sake of establishing some background here:. Im currently 37 years old. In October of 2016 I closed on my first house. I had joked at the time that it was a risky period to be buying a home what with my union's contract negotiations happening a month later in November, however typically our negotiations basically just maintained the status quo, and after ten years of living in an apartment I desperately wanted my own house. Apartment living was becoming intolerable for a variety of reasons.
Well, of course, our contract negotiations ended up going very badly for my union, and we all took a significant pay cut (Equivalent to about a quarter of my yearly income). And now I had a mortgage for a house that I had bought based on my previous income, I can still afford the house but not as easily as I could before (While house shopping, I made a conscious decision that I did not want to live paycheck to paycheck because every cent I earned was going to my mortgage, so I deliberately chose a smaller, lower priced home). My mortgage payments auto-deduct from a savings account, a certain amount of money goes in every month via direct deposit and every month a broadly equivalent amount of money goes out to pay the mortgage. Up until August of 2016 my car payments came out of that account too, but I paid my car off two months before taking on the mortgage. Otherwise I don't really touch this account and the amount of money in there has remained at more or less the same level since I closed on the house. Aside from the mortgage payments, and my car payments back when I had those, that account is "emergency money" that I generally just leave alone.
Meanwhile, with my reduced income I found myself relying on my credit card more than I ever had before because I was attempting to maintain a lifestyle similar to what I had for the ten years prior to my sudden pay cut.
My monthly minimum payments on the card are now becoming burdensome, and the other day it finally sunk in just how much debt I've racked up on that card - equivalent to about half of what is in my savings account.
I've begun debating taking 25% to 50% of the balance of that savings account and wiping out 50% to 100% of the credit card debt, then once that's done take the difference of what I had been paying in monthly minimum CC payments and via direct deposit adding that amount to the money that is already going into that savings account every week, which would start replacing the money I robbed from it (albeit very slowly, like over the course of several years).
Meanwhile, going forward, I'd be trying to conduct myself more responsibly with regard to my credit card, and accept that life is different now and I just don't have the income that I used to have.
So does this sound like the best of a bunch of bad options? Or should I leave the savings account untouched and just keep chipping away at my CC debt via minimum payments?
Right now, I'm leaning toward robbing the account, paying either a significant portion of my credit card debt, or all of it, and starting over fresh, and trying to budget better and not letting this happen again. but I'm curious if it's a particularly risky or stupid idea to draw my savings down in this way. (It's obviously risky and stupid, but I mean is it riskier and stupider in comparison to what I'm currently doing?)
The idea of cutting my account balance down by that much kinda makes me sick, but so does my credit card debt.
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