Debt Totals 4/25/17

Considering all our travel and spending, it was a decent month for debt payoff. Our credit card balance did go down as we our focusing all our energy on it.  It didn’t go down by as much as I would have liked, but a decrease is a decrease and I’m going to take it as a win. We are still doing a better job of allocating some money into all of our budget categories, however, that is at the expense of paying down debt, but if we continue to fund our budget envelopes, we shouldn’t need to charge as much going forward (vacations not included).

Since we are now focusing on our biggest debt, we, obviously, were unable to clear away any more debts this month, and probably won’t be able to for several months.

As of my last update in March, we owed of $28475.24. 

Here are our current debt totals:

            $11794.07        Credit Card at 15.49% - current minimum payment is $287

            $1350               The Boy (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from him.)

            $1350               The Girl (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from her.)

            $12055.25        Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

Our current debt stands at $26549.32

We paid off $1925.92, or 6.7% of our debt total; that’s even including stupid tax, aka, interest. Incidentally, that’s the exact same percentage we paid off last month, even though we paid slightly fewer dollars this month.

Overall, our debt decreased. That is a trend we hope to continue. Because of our D.C. trip, I don’t expect our debt payoff to be especially good next month. In all honesty, I’m hoping to break even on the credit card and to continue to make a little progress on the remaining three debts.

We are continuing to make slow progress every paycheck, one per month for me and two per month for The Husband, towards savings and paying our children back. We put $50, per paycheck, into savings. We are ever so slowly building our emergency fund and adding money to The Kids’ accounts. At this rate it would take forever to pay them back, but at least we are making strides. Once our credit card debt is cleared out, we will be able to pay them back quickly.

When planning our May budget, I did try to fund our different budget categories, which has been the problem in the past. I didn’t fund those categories, but the kids still need clothes, hair needs to be cut, and toilet paper needs to be bought. Although by funding these we pay off debt more slowly, it also keeps us from accruing more debt because we have, at least some of, the money we need to buy essentials. For the month of May, we allocated over $600 to different budget categories, not including food or gas. In all honesty, it’s probably not enough, but at least it’s a start. As we pay off more and more debt, we will be able to fully fund all our envelopes.  Many of those envelopes are starting to have a balance carry over from month to month, which will really help as we need to start spending money from those categories.

I do feel like 6% is a great number, and much better than the increase we had from November to February. If we were able to have 6% gains every month, that would be awesome. But, being realistic here, some months are better than others. The goal right now, is to not increase our debt totals and to keep them going down. My goal is to lower our debt total every month, whether by baby steps or leaps and bounds. 

For next month, my goal is to break even with our credit card bill, after interest, I want the balance to be $11794, or lower. Our Washington D.C. trip was very expensive and I’m hoping that we can “pay for it” using all cash. In other words, if we break even, we were able to pay for our whole trip, just not able to put any extra towards debt. Again, it’s going to be close. We do have some reimbursements coming our way from The Husband’s company and that will help us towards our goal too. We will just have to wait and see how much our reimbursement totals are.