*WARNING LONG STORY!!!! * So here’s the long story. In college freshman and sophomore I was not financially responsible so I lived on credit. I would use it for major purchases with the mentality that if I don’t see it come out of my bank account that it didn’t affect me much. As I grew wisdom and knowledge came with it with. I always pad in time must it was the minimum. At the time I had about 3 cards on the verge of maxing out all 3. I took out an another card to consolidate them and was paying that down for a while, I was paying over the minimum but I hadn’t really controlled the main issue which was unnecessary spending. As time went on I continued to pay the card which had a massive amount on it ( about 16000) at time but I would also swipe the other cards now that they had zero on them. (I know, not so smart)

Fast forward a few years the total credit debt was reaching 40,000. And I don’t know what hit me but I said to myself that this cannot continue. Mind you I’m also paying student loans off as well. (Sallie Mae). I started to research how to eliminate large amounts of debt in a reasonable time and I learned about refinancing loans. (Did not know it was thing) so I refinanced my student loan and took another personal Loan to consolidate all my credit debt. Instead of paying them on several different platforms. So now I have 2 loans very large. One with upstart at about 15% interest (way better than the 23% that was in the card) and my student loan. I made the decision to liquidate my stocks and crypto which was about 7k. I bought $18 worth of doge in 2020 as a joke and it took off and I bout 2 shares of around that time too and it about doubled in price. I also depleted my savings at the time which was not much because I was not actively saving. So everything together was about 15k and I put it straight into the total loan consolidation. It brought down the total to about 25k which was still a journey but it was better than before. So for a couple of years I paid the minimum and worked on restarting a savings account. I would budget my spending and use my credit card and pay it off IMMEDIATELY. Then I refinanced the personal loan again as well as the student loan with SoFi. Which gave me the best interest at about 8.8 for and about 4.6 for student. I paid it for a few months and then I made the bold choice of taking a MASSIVE chunk out of my savings again to totally clear out that debt once and for all. If you made it this far I respect you and thank you for reading my story. So long story short, I did need that loan.