I’m not exactly thrilled to share this, but over the last 6 years I went from being debt free to racking up $30,673 in credit card debt.
The craziest part?
I’ve been able to pay off several accounts including credit cards, 16 different Affirm loans, and a $6k personal loan over the last couple years so this wasn’t even peak debt.
That said, I want to share my plan to pay off all these accounts, because it’s been working well so far.
But first, let’s break down what we have to pay.
My Insane Credit Card Debt Breakdown
I’m not including the account names for privacy reasons, but everything you see below is up to date as of 4/1/25 which I update in a Google Sheet on the first of every month.
This is what we’re looking at right now:
| Credit Card | Minimum Payment | Balance |
| Account 1 | $30 | $198 |
| Account 2 | $25 | $561 |
| Account 3 | $28 | $781 |
| Account 4 | $47 | $908 |
| Account 5 | $93 | $968 |
| Account 6 | $50 | $960 |
| Account 7 | $30 | $957 |
| Account 8 | $37 | $1,085 |
| Account 9 | $43 | $1,072 |
| Account 10 | $39 | $1,095 |
| Account 11 | $30 | $1,137 |
| Account 12 | $29 | $1,337 |
| Account 13 | $71 | $1,640 |
| Account 14 | $67 | $1,918 |
| Account 15 | $80 | $2,378 |
| Account 16 | $122 | $2,401 |
| Account 17 | $100 | $2,574 |
| Account 18 | $150 | $2,627 |
| Account 19 | $80 | $2,960 |
| Account 20 | $115 | $3,116 |
The first thing you’ll notice is the fact that we have 20 accounts with balances, which has been absolutely crazy to manage but we’ve been making it work.
How I Got In So Much Debt In The First Place
Before I get into our very simple plan to pay off these cards, I wanted to briefly mention how I racked up so much debt which was a combination of several things:
- During 2020 when the job market was actually insane, we pretty much lived off unemployment, my tiny email marketing business, and credit cards.
- In 2023 my then-pregnant wife and I packed up the car with our toddler, dog, and everything we could fit and booked an AirBNB for a month here in the Midwest and put everything on credit before I got a job and apartment 3 weeks later.
- December 30th, 2023 our apartment became unfit to live in with a toddler and infant due to smoke of various plants seeping in, so we booked another 2 AirBNB for 37 days before moving into this house, which is where that personal loan came from.
- Used and abused Affirm loans to get beds, furniture, TVs, etc. and still had to use credit due to unbearable jobs getting progressively worse with each new job.
Peak credit card debt was around June of 2024, and it stayed pretty level until recently when we used our tax refund in March 2025 to pay off the rest of the Affirms and the personal loan balance.
After that was taken care of, we’ve been focused on the debt payment plan:
How I’m Making Our Debt Go Away
The whole debt payment process is quite simple:
Stick to Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball system as closely as possible.
We pay minimums on every single account, except the one with the lowest balance.
We carry over all the previous minimum payments of paid off accounts to the lowest balance account, so instead of paying $30 per month on Account 1 in the list above…
We SHOULD be paying $550, which means that account would be paid off in 0.36 months…
And most months we can, but sometimes we can’t so our modified version is simply paying as much as we actually can on the lowest balance account.
Even without being able to follow the system perfectly, we’ve still knocked out a ton of accounts and are well on our way to paying everything off.
If everything stays even mostly on the plan and no crazy expenses come up, we should be credit card debt free by March of 2027!
(Being real here, we’re going to put every penny of any potential tax refund into paying this off too)
Then we gotta figure out my wife’s student loans and our admittedly ridiculous car payments…
How Are You Handling Debt?
To be clear here, I’m not a financial advisor and this is not meant to be taken as financial advice.
I’m simply sharing what has been working for us to hopefully inspire you to keep going even when it feels like you’re drowning in debt.
And if you’re not tracking your debt, I highly recommend looking up a debt snowball type Google Sheet template and updating it every month to get a real picture of whats going on.
Even if you’re only down $10 down from last month, it’s still $10 down.
Any comments or questions? Let me know below.
Talk soon,
-Gabe
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