This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mattie Gardner. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My husband and I are in credit card debt. We started at $63,227, and our current balance is $17,401.
Back in 2022, we took a big risk and jumped into a building business opportunity offered to us by an acquaintance. I was working full-time then, but we decided to leap, and I quit my job. My husband also walked away from his career for this business.
We had no income. It was a combination of bad timing, not great choices, and an inability to face the reality of our situation. We racked up $65,000 in credit card debt in a year. Our personal finances were a mess because we were relying on credit cards for our normal expenses.
We gave it a year, and then both said we cannot do this anymore. In 2023, we both got full-time jobs shortly thereafter and slowly began rebuilding our lives. But the damage had been done.
I started a social media account to hold us accountable for the payments
In October 2025, my husband got three paychecks in one month; it was just the way it landed that month. I remember thinking that if we didn’t take action right now, we’d miss the window of opportunity to start paying down the debt.
We had been kicking the can down the road for way too long, thinking that something might save us. Finally, I realized nothing was coming to save us. So I created the account in November 2025 to document the debt payment progress and what the journey would look like; I also thought it would be cool to look back on the videos and see how far we’d come once we paid it off.
I was hoping along the way we’d also find a community with people in a similar situation because I had seen creators post about debt, and it made me feel seen. One day, I uploaded a video about our debt, and it went viral.
We had to make serious sacrifices and create new mindsets
We had to sell our house. We didn’t make nearly as much as we thought we would. We put everything we made from the sale toward the credit card debt. We are currently living at my parents’ house; they moved out of state, and we pay the mortgage. We have accepted that we likely won’t own a home for many years. We also only have one car, which we have to make work.
I wasn’t involved in our finances before this. I avoided them. I didn’t want to be involved because numbers and money scared me. That’s a belief I had built up, that I’m bad at math, so I shouldn’t be involved in finances. I’ve had to overcome that fear. There’s very little to do with money that scares me now.
This has strengthened our relationship because we’ve had to work as a team to get it done. We still fight about money and budgeting all the time, but we’re not afraid to have these conversations anymore. We know they need to be had.
The biggest thing that got us to where we are — $40,000 paid down — is doing a personal audit. We know our finances really well and are budgeting now. We know what’s in our budget and what’s in our bank accounts every day. We think about it all the time, which we didn’t previously do. We use a spreadsheet I bought from Etsy and an app called EveryDollar.
We hope to pay off the remaining credit card debt by the end of the summer. It’s optimistic, but we’re certain we can do that and then begin tackling other debt that needs to be paid off, like student loans. We want to shift into saving mode as well, start contributing to a high-yield savings account, and make that a higher priority.
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