Debt Happenings

This morning when I opened up our online banking, we had a deposit of $15000. Our 401K loan has been processed, approved, and deposited into our account. I am both happy and sad about this. Happy because we had a 401K loan to borrow from; happy because we now have some money in the bank to work on home repairs, happy because we are one step closer to putting our house on the market and buying a new home. I’m sad because it’s more debt; sad because we didn’t have any savings to work with in the first place; sad because, even nearing middle age, we can’t get our finances together.

This money does give me something to work with, though. This money is being used for home repairs to help make our house ready to sell and as possible good faith/down payment money. I was able to go into our accounts this morning and transfer back the money into savings that I had to use the other day because of The Husband’s time card snafu. That will all get corrected when he receives his check next week and we deposit into our checking account.

Like I said, this money gave me something to work with. It made me sit down and revisit my February and March numbers. There wasn’t much change as far as February goes because the month is nearly over. But I did add a line item for paying my friend back that wasn’t there before. I will be paying her back with the last paycheck of the month. Then I will be one debt down and 37 or so to go.

As I was going over my budget for March, our debt repayment was looking pretty lean. Then I really studied the numbers and I saw that we were paying back a lot of debt… just not a lot towards the credit card. We will pay back our friend who booked a hotel for us. We will be paying back our entire plumbing bill, at almost $2000, $1800 towards our credit card, and $345 towards our car payment. I wish I could allocate all the money towards our credit card bill, but realistically, I have other bills to take care of and by paying the plumbing bill next month, that’s one more creditor I will be able to knock off the list.

Next month should be a pretty good month for debt payoff. Of course, until the debt is gone, it will never be enough, but after any purchases and interest, we should still knock out about $2000 worth of debt. At least that’s how much I’m hoping we can eliminate.

It’s so funny, that 401K loan is burning a hole in my pocket. I see that money sitting in my account and think, “that’s enough to wipe out our credit card debt and start paying the kids back”. Then I have to take a step back and remember that then we won’t have the money to do any home repairs or good faith money to put an offer on a home. We also want to pay that money back as soon as possible. Whatever we don’t use for its intended purposes, we plan to put a lump sum payment back towards the 401K. Patience, Prudence.

I know slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes I sure wish there was a magic fix for our stupidity!