Debt Update

Our last debt total wasn’t as good as I had hoped, but we did keep our debt going in the right direction. Last month, we paid off 2.8% of our total debt. I’m hoping we did better this month because at that pace we would be in debt for 35 more months. However, as long as our debt totals continue to go down, I’m counting it as a win. We are going in the right direction and not adding any debt each month.

The debt we owe our children has continued to (ever so slowly) decrease. We borrowed almost $1500 from each child and have paid back $1200 to each of them, which means we are 80% of the way through paying them back! Although once we have fully paid them back, we will continue to deposit $50 into their bank accounts, I will be so happy when I can no longer consider them a debt! Our car loan has continued to decrease as well. 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 fourth month in a row, our overall debt decreased! (I am so happy to get to be writing that instead of having to say again that our debt went up!) We are not making giant leaps and bounds in our debt repayment, but slow and steady wins the race.

Here are our current debt totals:

            $18,953.69       Credit Card at 16.24% interest

            $300                 The Girl

            $300                 The Boy

            $5130.00          Car Loan at 0% interest

          

Our total debt stands at: $24,683.69. YIKES! I can hardly wrap my head around that number. I absolutely HATED seeing a 2 as the first number on our credit card and I’m so happy that our credit card debt is back under $20,000 and at least our credit card debt only has a 1 in the front! In the grand scheme of things, the actual amount of debt is not that much less but psychologically there is a huge difference! I’m hoping for a much bigger decrease next month!

Plus side: our debt decreased! We paid off over $1300 of debt in actual dollars, which amounted to about 5% of our total debt. We continue to make progress on both our car loan and the loan to The Kids and the fact that we haven’t borrowed any more money from The Kids is a plus. A bonus is that our total debt fell into the 24K-something range. Any little win is a win!

Down side: we didn’t pay off as much as I would have liked because Christmas is expensive. We had an entire extra paycheck during this budget period which did help our totals, but if it wasn’t for Christmas, it would have been more. 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 $18000 and hitting my goal of under $18000 by 12/31/18. Making continued progress on our car loan and decreasing our overall debt from 24K-something to 23K-something. I’m also looking ahead to after Christmas when I really get back to a cash only budget! I’m also happy that with my next debt update, our car loan will have fallen by another thousands place from the 5Ks to the 4Ks. This is through no action on our own but just from steadily plugging away. Every little bit helps and any forward progress is good progress.

Obviously all my financial goals for the year have been thrown out the window. This is the last month of the year and I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be. However, I can’t change the past, all I can do is improve my future. Since our credit card debt is still so high, my goal for the end of 2018 is to be under $18000 in credit card debt. My other debts will continue to decrease at their slow and steady pace, but I am going to payoff $2000 more in credit card debt by the end of the year.

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! My debt update posts are consistently my longest posts. This was another one.  If you stayed around until the end, thank you! If you got bored and moved on, I totally understand.

Look out goal #1: below $18000 in credit card debt by 12/31/18… I’m coming for you!

Once we conquer this goal, I will really share our goals for 2019 and how or why I plan to focus on them.

Right now, I am dying to get our overall debt down below $20,000.