This is my first debt update since March! EEEEKKKK!
Unfortunately, things haven’t changed nearly as much as I would have liked, but
on the plus side, we do have less debt than we did then. After this update, our
debt increased. We made some big and unplanned purchases that we put on credit.
Some of them were necessary and some of them were not, but they were all
expensive.
We had a crazy summer and have been slowly digging our way out.
This debt update will be based on our current totals. I
will compare our current credit card to debt to our last month’s statement. I
will include our car loan. We do have a couple of other debts that I don’t
really talk about here. We have a 401K loan on my husband’s account that we
took out 2 ½ years ago when we planned to move. We also have a 10 year loan for
our solar that we are only one year into paying. I probably should include
these, but for whatever reason I don’t.
For various and sundry reasons, we still have a ton of
credit card debt. But, (for the millionth time we are starting again!) we are
going to get out of credit card debt. We are going to keep decreasing our
credit card balance until it reaches $0! Even though we are mired in debt, at
least our car loan has continued to decrease. We have a 0% loan so it’s nice to
see the payment actually affect the bottom line; to that end, I don’t really
focus on paying extra towards our car payment because it’s at 0% interest. I
know that goes against what Dave Ramsey teaches, but I can’t see paying more
interest on my credit card balance just to get an interest free loan paid off
quicker.
Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I
would like, I am happy to say that for the first month in a row, (hahaha) our
overall debt decreased! (I am so happy to get to be writing that instead of
having to say that our debt went up! Quite honestly, we kind of took a blogging
and debt update hiatus when our debt was increasing, and not because it was
increasing, life just went sideways!) Usually we are not making giant leaps and
bounds in our debt repayment, but believe that slow and steady wins the race,
but last month was actually pretty good as far as debt progress goes.
Our last credit card statement had a balance of
$17,887.61. Being real here, it wasn’t pretty.
Here are our current debt totals:
$16,020.28 Credit Card at 16.74% interest
$1990.00 Car
Loan at 0% interest
Our total debt stands at: $18,010.28. YIKES! I can still hardly
wrap my head around that number, but at least we are finally under $20,000 in
debt. It’s still a lot, but I’m a little sad that falling under the $20,000
mark happened without any fanfare. In fact, in all the craziness of our life, I
didn’t even realize we had gotten below that number until I was writing this
debt update. That’s just another reason that I think keeping this blog is so
important. It keeps me aware and accountable!
Plus side: we started actively tracking our debt again! Our
debt decreased! We paid off almost $1867.33 of credit card debt in actual
dollars, plus another $345 towards our car, which amounted to about *11.5% of
our total debt. With our last payment, we dropped another thousand on our car
loan! The fact that we haven’t borrowed any more money from The Kids is a plus.
We continue to make progress towards our retirement and to contribute $50 a
month to our kids’ bank accounts.
*We actually had a great month for debt payoff! 11.5% is
nothing to sneeze at! If we could do that every month, our debt would be gone
in 9 months. If only… However, I’m pretty excited to see we had double digit
decreases and am hoping to have another good month next month. We had some
unexpected “windfalls” of money that helped get us here: a car insurance
refund, an expected, but forgotten, small extra paycheck, some returns, and of
course, No-Spend September. All-in-all, a pretty good month.
Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never
enough. We also had a few months of backsliding and not keeping track of
where we were. L Also, we did still charge on our
credit card. Of course I also hate that several hundreds of dollars went
towards interest on our credit instead of towards the principal.
Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $16,000
and keeping it that way, also making continued progress on our car loan. I’m
also looking forward to getting back on the debt pay-off and blogging band
wagon! I was off of it for too long and it feels good to be making progress
again! If we truly have an exceptional month of debt payoff, we could
potentially skip the $15K range altogether and barely break into the $14K
range. Honestly, that will be a stretch, but it won’t be impossible. I’m also
hoping that with our next debt update, we can totally skip the $17K range and
fall into the $16K range. Again, that is a stretch, but not totally
unrealistic. Wish us luck!
Clearly, I’m not in an ideal situation. But if I have to
get out of debt one baby step at a time, I can do that.
WOW! Another long post! If you stayed around until
the end, thank you! If you got bored and moved on, I totally understand.
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