I am your host, Mr. DebtBeater. This is where I tell you a lot more about me, so you can relate to my story and more closely compare your situation to mine.

Family

I am happily married to Mrs. DebtBeater. I have six wonderful (and yes, expensive) children who really know how to literally eat up most of our income. Most of my time is spent providing for Mrs. DebtBeater and the little rugrats as a Software Developer. I’ve been in IT since about 1996, and it’s been a decent living so far. The last few years the larger family has pushed us toward using credit cards to get the things we wanted (well before we needed them) and buying larger suburban houses than we could really afford.

Financial State

Our household income is roughly $80K/yr, and we’ve gotten to the point where our monthly expenses exceed our income by about $500 a month. This is simply unsustainable for much more than a couple of years before we simply can’t borrow any more.

Another key factor that’s really put us on the warpath is the fact that we have a sub-prime loan on our home, and we owe well more than it’s worth on a second mortgage we used to consolidate our massive list of credit cards. We’ve still got a couple of years left before the rates can change, and we have no pre-payment penalties on either mortgage. However if we don’t get serious right now we’re going to be in some real trouble soon.

Site Development

I do my own development, so things sometimes take longer to fix or create than sites that have dedicated outsourced programmers or use pre-developed templates. I consider myself savvy enough to tinker my way into getting what I want eventually though. I’ve procrastinated enough to get the blog running, and have decided to start now to begin our quest and complete the features I wanted on this site as I can.

Join in the fun!

I invite you to jump in and participate at any time. Share your story with us all, and through the power of a community we can help motivate each other with our successes and encourage each other through some difficult decisions.

You can subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail by using the subscribe options on the sidebar. Thanks for coming by!