New Debt Update

I still haven’t decided exactly how I want to share my debt totals every month, so for now, I’m going to stick with a middle of the month recap.

As of last month, we owed $20180.17. Holy cow that’s a lot of money to owe to other nameless, faceless people!

Over the course of the last 4 and ½ weeks, we have made a payment to our credit card and towards our car loan.  For now, any extra money we have (which isn’t much because of the kitchen remodel) goes towards our credit card that carries a balance. Last month, I was able to make a payment that was about 2 and ½ times the minimum payment. 

Okay, here goes. The numbers for this month:

Credit Card 1: $5314.52 at 9.24% interest ~ the current minimum payment is $160

Car Loan 1: $14125.25 at 0% interest ~ payment is $345

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If you’re keeping track, that’s a grand total of $19439.77

On the plus side, we are down below the $20000 mark and that’s a nice barrier to break. I much prefer seeing a 1 as the first number as opposed to a 2! Last month we paid off 3.6% of our total debt. We paid a total of $780, but stupid tax, (more commonly referred to as interest) ate up some of that.  Only $740.40 went towards paying off the principle. As always, I wish it was more, but the takeaway here is that our total debt decreased.  We did not add any more debt and we were able to pay more than the minimum payment.

My goal for next month is to bring our credit card down under the $5000 mark, after interest.  In order to do that, I will have to pay about $356.  In my budget, I included $300 towards our credit card, so we only need to come up with an extra $56.

The kitchen has really complicated our debt payoff. Any extra money at the end of the month is being diverted to pay for the kitchen. (The current balance on the card that we pay off monthly is $4800!!!) I’m hoping that we will be able to increase the payment amount on our credit card 1 balance to bring it under $5000. If we can, that would be another psychological boost.  Once we are under $5000, we will have paid off half of a maxed out card. I know it’s not much, but we need to start somewhere and baby steps are all we have right now.

(This is copied and pasted directly from my last debt totals update from September 16, 2016.) I’m trying to keep my head up and remember that our total debt load decreases every month, if only by a little. I try to remember that we haven’t added to our debt total in 10 months and that we are better off now than when we started 2016. I try to remember that we choose to not let debt dictate our life or to punish our kids for our poor financial habits/choices.  That’s it in a nutshell, I’m trying.

We aren’t debt free, but we have a plan and are working it.  If we keep at it, we will be debt free.

You can see my last update here.