Trying to Find a Silver Lining

I confided in a life-long friend last night of the sudden situation at home. They came over and hung out, not wanting to leave me alone in this current state of misery. We spent the better portion of the night talking about my spouse and my past, our previous problems, conflicts, failed attempts at separation/divorce, affairs, flings, financial ruin, all of it. All of the past being painfully amplified by the common pattern my spouse once-again took. Their attempts to hurt me and protecting their self image. It was all insanely painful, but it was also good to talk. More than anything, I just want to talk. That is all I have ever wanted really.

Tonight, while I was giving them a ride home, I had an idea for trying to clean up a huge swath of the credit card debt and at least mitigating the financial ruin my spouse was evoking on us both.

Umong our various loans, one loan in particular was a secured loan. This loan in and of itself more or less zeros itself out in the budget and really doesn’t cost anything outside of the interest rate added to each payment. My idea was to use the $10k currently in checking and pay off the secured loan. This would at least increase my monthly available funds by a small amount and would instantly return that same $10k back into our checking account. Further more, I could clear the balance on at least 2 of the credit cards and bring our overall credit card debt into a manageable range. On top of that, I estimated we would still have over $2k left over in our checking account.

The more I thought about this approach the more I sold myself on the idea. At the very least it would reduce the financial debt that both my spouse and I would end up splitting (50/50 in this state) as part of our divorce. With that goal in mind I paid off the secured loan and issued balance payments on all of the cards, targeting the ones adding the highest monthly interest penalty first. Sure it wouldn’t close out all of our debt, but a large portion of it was in Unsecured Loans on payment plans. It was the Credit Card debt that was the largest danger.

It wasn’t much, but it was a small glimmer in the otherwise black void of an empty home.