Credit Karma caught up with me paying off my car loan with a credit card and now lists me at about 27k in credit card debt. Took almost a 100-point dive in my credit score overnight.
Despite having about $7,000 in bills this past month, I somehow paid it all off. Managed to make minimum payments on all of the credit cards that are either on very low interest or no interest right now, rent, car insurance, school loans, and a $5,400 credit card statement bill for my credit card I pay everything with and always pay off on top of still saving my normal 5% Roth 401k for company match and doing my normal tithe. My bills for May are to be even worse because of a $2k tax bill, $700 in government fees for my wife's 10-year green card, and a credit card statement bill that is already over $4k and will be closer to $5k by the end of april due to having to pay another $670 to fix my Subaru's exhaust that got clogged from three turbos dying and spitting metal fragments into the catalytic converter. Depending on how long it takes for me to get my Subaru back, I might be able to delay payment on it until the next credit card statement rolls around so that I can pay that bill in June.
My bills in June should be not quite normal, but much better. My wife's windshield has a full-length crack in it, so we're replacing it in late April for $275 (would allow me to pay it off in late June). The last major repair on the Audi I recently bought that shouldn't go too long without doing is the exposed boots on the axle shafts, which is probably doing to be quite expensive (possibly over a grand). I might do that sometime in May, but I may wait a month or two just to catch up a little bit as long as my mechanic thinks it will be ok.
I know this sounds all crazy, but a lot of it is just debt moving around, and the sale of the Subaru will totally cancel out both the purchase of the Audi and all of its repairs combined, bringing me right back down to a total of $20k credit card debt as opposed to 11k in car loans and 9k in credit card debt. It just sucks that a $2k tax bill, $700 in immigration fees, and and 3 grand in car bills (just the ones on the Subaru and BMW) all came at once.
It's so crazy how much better things are now though than they were in 2015 and 2016. In 2015, I made only 16 grand for the ear to losing my job in January 2015, then getting and losing another job from may to July 2015, only to finally get a good job in October of 2015. This is where most of my credit card bills came from for today--not having a job for most of the year while moving across country to be with my wife.
Then, in 2016, I was having to support my wife, who couldn't work for the first few months of living in the US and then worked part-time for only 4 months in 2016 until 2017. Having a $1,400 rent bill each month while paying off a massive car loan, 20 grand in credit card bills, school loans, and 3 grand to an immigration lawyer while only making $46,000 between me and my wife for the year was really tough in 2016.
In 2017, both of us were working full-time (made about 69 grand total between the both of us), and we were finally able to start breaking even and being slightly in the green each month, being able to make extra payments on debt each month.
Fast forward to this year, we're set to make about $92,000 this year between us, which is nothing crazy, but it's still well above the median household income. Our rent is down to $1,025 a month and car insurance is down to just over $100 a month (down from $275 for both cars). Our lawyer has long been paid off. After the Subaru is paid off, we'll only owe $20 grand in credit card debt with no car loan debt. Looks like we've paid off almost $20k in debt since 2016, and that's going to greatly be accelerated from now on. Life really is good.