Debt Update - June 2017

This was a decent month for debt payoff, not great, but acceptable. We spent tons of money on house purchases, but they were all paid off right away. (We did charge them in order to earn points, but paid them off as soon as we got home.) We definitely ate out too much, but that had to do with moving and not being able to find things and having to feed all the families that came over to help us.

We did not have a mortgage payment in the month of June so that helped accelerate our debt payoff. (We also will not have one in July, but that will pay for our summer vacation.) The move was very expensive, but we were still able to knock out some debt and bring out credit card debt under the $10000 mark, which was our goal. We aren't far under $10000, but we made it. We dropped a digit on our debt payoff and that is awesome!

As of my last update in May, we owed a total of $25749.58. 

Here are our current debt totals:

            $9380.92        Credit Card at 15.49% - current minimum payment is $279

            $1250             The Boy (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from him.)

            $1250             The Girl (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from her.)

            $11365.25       Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

Our current debt stands at $23246.17

We paid off $2503.41, or 9.7% (so close to 10%, but just a little short) of our debt total; that’s even including stupid tax, aka, interest. I wish we had made 10%, but I'm really happy with our progress this month. I have to take the wins where I can find them.

Overall, our debt decreased. That is a trend we hope to continue. Next month's debt repayment will not be as impressive as this month. We have vacation coming up and we are planning to pay for that in cash. The money that would normally go towards debt repayment, is being funneled towards paying for vacation without going farther into debt. I would love to be able to continue with this traction and keep knocking some debt out!

My main financial goal is to bring our car payment down to under $11000. I will need to add just $20.25 to our payment. That should be more than doable.

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. Our emergency fund currently stands at around $1650 with slow growth each month.

When planning our July budget, I continued trying 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 June, we have tentatively allocated $1100 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.