Debt Totals 2-18-17

As you know, unfortunately, my debt total rose for the first time in 12 months last month. I’m very sad, but now, I’m more determined than ever to get out of debt. We are going to continue to live our life, but we are going to get out of credit card debt!

Not only has our debt total increased, but so has the amount of creditors we have. We have several small debts now that we didn’t have before.

I’m going to list them all here for you to see. I’m also going to list them in the order we intend to pay them off. In many ways we are working Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, but as you’ll see when I list our debts, we aren’t following them 100%. We are going to pay off some debts in a different order than he would recommend.

As of my last debt update, we owed $18774.63. That was back in November. Things have definitely changed since then.

Here are our debts:

            $500-ish            Personal friend (she booked our hotel room for a trip).

            $1969.62           Outstanding bill from our kitchen remodel

            $12314.86         Credit Card at 14.99% - current minimum payment is $

            $1500               The Boy (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from him.)

            $1500               The Girl (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from her.)

            $12745.25         Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

If you’re keeping track, (I know I am!) that’s a grand total of $30529.97.  That’s about at $12000 increase over our last debt total up date. EEEKKK!!! That makes me want to cry.

In the next month, I’m going to knock out the two small debts at the top of the list, then I really need to get to work on our credit card debt. Looking at these numbers, it seems very unlikely that I will be able to become credit card debt free by March or even by my goal of May, but I should still be able to get out of credit card debt by the end of this year, so that is what I am going to keep working on.

Looking at my budgets going forward, we should be able to pay off the first two debts by March 10 and then we can start throwing all our extra money towards our credit card debt.  We still charge on that credit card because, unfortunately, we are financing our lifestyle with our future earnings, so our credit card debt will likely increase before it starts to go down. Does that make sense? After we pay off a couple debts, any extra money can go towards our credit card.

I’m hoping that paying off these two small debts will give me the psychological boost I so need to keep motivated and really work to get out of debt.  Although we still charge on our credit card, I’m really going to try to charge less in the coming months. We aren’t going for no-spend months, but we are definitely working towards low-spend months.  We do have some planned spending that can’t be avoided, but hopefully we won’t overspend.

Also, now that we are back to working the envelope system, I need to work really hard on staying on budget. That would go a long way towards helping us get out of debt. We went WAY over on our food budget just this past week. Major budgeting fail, but going forward, we are really trying to stay in budget so we don’t have to charge any shortfall. In addition to not having to charge a shortfall, tightening our budgeting belt might give us a small surplus each pay period that we can throw towards debt or add to our surplus envelopes at home.

Another complication for our finances right now, is our living situation. We are looking to sell our house and buy a new one. Because we have a boy and a girl, our two bedroom house is no longer practical for us, but the explanation is a post for another day; as is the explanation for our new debts… Until then, wish us luck in paying off some debts!