Every debt payoff article on the internet says the same thing: “make a plan and stick to it.” Then they show you a chart with hypothetical numbers that have nothing to do with your life.
Here are my actual numbers. The real ones. What I owed, what I was paying, what I changed, and where I am right now. No hypotheticals, no “let’s say you owe $10,000” examples. This is $40,000 of real debt from a real divorce, and what it actually takes to dig out.
The Damage: $40,000 Across Three Buckets
After my divorce in 2023, here’s what I was responsible for:
| Debt | Balance | Interest Rate | What It Was |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Equity Line (HELOC) | $30,000 | ~7% | Furniture, flooring, and repairs when we bought the house |
| Credit Cards | $8,000 | ~24% | Accumulated spending, some from the separation |
| Medical Debt | $2,000 | 0% (collections) | Old bills that slipped through the cracks |
| Total | $40,000 |
Forty thousand dollars. On one income. With a special needs son depending on me.
Here’s what made it worse: most of this debt made sense when there were two incomes. A $30,000 HELOC at 7% is manageable when two people are paying the bills. After a divorce, the same debt on half the income feels like someone doubled it overnight.
What I Was Paying Before (The Minimum Payment Trap)
Before I got serious about paying this off, here’s what my monthly debt payments looked like:
| Debt | Monthly Payment | What Was Actually Happening |
|---|---|---|
| HELOC | ~$350 | Mostly interest. At 7% on $30,000, about $175/month was just interest charges. The other $175 chipped away at the balance — slowly. |
| Credit Cards | ~$200 | This is where it gets ugly. At 24% APR on $8,000, roughly $160 of that $200 was interest. I was paying $200/month and only $40 was actually reducing what I owed. |
| Medical Debt | ~$100 | Payment plan with the collections agency. At least this one had no interest. |
| Total | ~$650/month | Only about $315 was reducing my actual debt. The rest — over half — was interest. |
Read that last line again. I was paying $650 a month and only $315 of it was actually making the problem smaller. At that rate, the credit cards alone would take over 16 years to pay off and cost me over $10,000 in interest — on an $8,000 balance.
That’s how minimum payments work. They’re designed to keep you paying, not to get you out of debt.
The Two Things That Changed Everything
1. I Found $600 a Month I Was Wasting
I’ve written about this in detail in my piece on breaking bad spending habits, but the short version: I was blowing over $1,000 a month on seven streaming services, fast food drive-thrus, coffee shops, and subscriptions I’d forgotten about. I cut $600 of that.
That $600 wasn’t “extra” money. It was money I already had — I was just setting it on fire every month without realizing it.
2. I Attacked the Highest Interest Debt First
This is called the avalanche method, and the math behind it is simple: pay minimums on everything except the debt with the highest interest rate. Throw every extra dollar at that one until it’s dead. Then move to the next highest.
For me, that meant the credit cards first (24%), then the HELOC (7%), and continuing the payment plan on the medical debt (0%).
Some people prefer the snowball method — paying off the smallest balance first for the psychological win. I get that. But with a 24% credit card eating me alive, I couldn’t afford the luxury of a feel-good strategy. I needed the mathematically optimal one.
The New Monthly Plan
Once I freed up the $600 from spending cuts, here’s what my debt payments looked like:
| Debt | Monthly Payment | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| Credit Cards (24%) | $800 | Minimum $200 + $600 extra. All firepower aimed here first. |
| HELOC (7%) | $350 | Kept paying the same amount. Not ideal, but the credit cards were the emergency. |
| Medical Debt (0%) | $100 | No interest, so no rush. Kept the payment plan going. |
| Total | ~$1,250/month |
Same income. Almost double the debt payments. The difference was entirely from money I used to spend on things I didn’t need.
What Actually Happened: The Timeline
Months 1-10: Killing the Credit Cards
At $800/month toward the credit cards, with about $640 hitting principal each month (the rest still going to interest, but shrinking as the balance dropped), the $8,000 in credit card debt was gone in about 10 months.
The day I made that last payment, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time — like maybe I wasn’t drowning anymore. Just treading water. But treading water felt like progress.
Interest saved by paying $800/month instead of $200/month: roughly $7,000. That’s not a typo. Minimum payments on those cards would have cost me almost as much in interest as the original balance.
Months 11-14: Medical Debt Done
The medical debt finished on its own payment plan schedule right around this time. $2,000 at $100/month — straightforward, no interest. Done.
Months 14-Present: All In on the HELOC
With the credit cards and medical debt gone, I redirected everything to the HELOC. Instead of $350/month, I started paying around $1,250/month toward it. At 7% interest on a shrinking balance, the principal reduction accelerated fast.
Where I Am Right Now
| Debt | Original Balance | Current Balance | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit Cards | $8,000 | $0 | Paid off |
| Medical Debt | $2,000 | $0 | Paid off |
| HELOC | $30,000 | ~$10,000 | Paying it down |
| Total | $40,000 | ~$10,000 | 75% done |
$40,000 to $10,000. Thirty thousand dollars paid off. Not by making more money. Not by getting lucky. By finding $600 a month I was wasting and pointing it at the debt that was costing me the most.
The Math That Motivates Me
At my current rate, the remaining $10,000 on the HELOC will be gone in about 8-9 months. After that, the $1,250 I’ve been throwing at debt every month becomes money I can redirect — toward my son’s special needs trust and ABLE account, toward building an emergency fund that actually works, toward things that grow instead of things that shrink.
Here’s what the full journey looks like in hard numbers:
| Minimum Payments Only | What I Actually Did | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly payment | $650 | $1,250 |
| Time to pay off $40k | 12-15+ years | ~3 years |
| Total interest paid | $25,000+ | ~$8,000 |
| Total cost of the debt | $65,000+ | ~$48,000 |
The difference between minimum payments and what I did: about $17,000 in interest and 10 years of my life. That’s not abstract. That’s a decade of monthly payments. That’s $17,000 that would’ve gone to banks instead of to my kid’s future.
What I’d Tell You
- You can’t budget your way out of debt if you don’t know where the money’s going. Pull three months of bank statements. Find the waste. I promise it’s there — mine was $1,050 a month hiding in subscriptions and drive-thrus.
- Attack the highest interest rate first. I know the snowball method feels better. If you need the psychological wins, do that. But if you can stomach it, the avalanche method saves real money. My credit cards at 24% were the fire. I put the fire out first.
- Minimum payments are designed to keep you in debt. I was paying $200/month on $8,000 in credit cards and only $40 was going to the actual balance. The rest was the bank’s cut. Paying minimums isn’t a strategy — it’s a subscription to your own debt.
- The extra money is already in your budget. I didn’t get a raise or a side hustle to free up $600/month. I just stopped spending it on things that weren’t making my life better. That money was always there. I just wasn’t paying attention.
- Have a reason, not just a plan. My reason was my son. Every dollar I saved in interest was a dollar closer to knowing he’d be okay. Your reason might be different, but you need one. Plans fail. Reasons don’t.
I’m not done yet. I’ve got $10,000 to go. But I can see the end now, and that changes everything about how it feels to make the payment each month. It stopped feeling like punishment and started feeling like progress.
If you’re sitting on a number that feels impossible — $20,000, $40,000, $100,000 — it’s not. It’s just math. Hard math, slow math, boring math. But math you can actually do.
Start with the bank statements. The answer is in there.
— Thomas