This is only my second debt update since March! EEEEKKKK!
I’m really trying to get back into blogging about my progress, keeping myself
accountable, and getting out of debt! We actually did pretty well last month,
decreasing our debt by 11.5%! I wish every month was that great! You can find
our last debt update here.
I’m a little bummed because this update isn’t going to be
as good as I had originally hoped. We did make progress on our debt, but we
were derailed by some other things. My mom owes us several hundred dollars for
different things we’ve purchased for her online or at stores (all for
Christmas), and my sister owes us $200 for show tickets that I thought she
would have paid us back by now. I’m not worried, I know we will be paid back
everything we are owed, but that just means we charged some stuff on our credit
card that wasn’t paid off like we thought it would be, and because of that, we
didn’t make some of the goals I had planned for us. I just need to remember
that our debt went in the right direction and we still decreased our total
debt.
This debt update is based on our current totals from our
last update. I do these mid-month because our credit card closes on the 15th.
I can’t wait for the day when we are consumer debt free and I can do our
financial savings updates at the
beginning of each month!
For various and sundry reasons, we still have a ton of
credit card debt. We are going to keep decreasing our credit card balance until
it reaches $0! Even though we are mired in debt, at least our car loan has
continued to decrease. 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 second month in a row, our overall
debt decreased! Usually we are not making giant leaps and bounds in our debt
repayment, but believe that slow and steady wins the race, but last month was actually
pretty good as far as debt progress goes. I’m hoping this month’s progress
looks pretty good too. Let’s get to the numbers!
Here are our current debt totals:
$15,395.43 Credit Card at 16.74% interest
$1645.00 Car
Loan at 0% interest
Our total debt stands at: $17,040.43 YIKES! It’s still a
lot of debt, but I love seeing that we are making progress! I wish I had known
how close we were to getting under $17,000 in debt, I would have tried to
schedule another payment to get there, but I can only do what I can do. All we
can do is just keep plugging away. We dug our hole one shopping trip at a time
and all we can do is pay it back one month at a time.
Plus side: we started actively tracking our debt again! Our
debt decreased! We paid off almost $1000 of debt, $969.85 exactly, which amounted
to about 5.4% of our total debt. The fact that we haven’t borrowed any more
money from The Kids is a plus. We continue to make progress towards our
retirement and to contribute $50 a month to our kids’ bank accounts. This debt update has our lowest credit card
balance and debt totals since our September 2017 debt update. For 2 years, our debt
was a roller coaster, down and up and around. No more. This update shows we are
making progress. Actually, compared to September 2017, our credit card debt is
higher, but our overall debt is less. We are making progress, albeit slow.
Hopefully we can ramp up our progress and NOT increase our debt again!
Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never
enough. We also had a few months of backsliding and not keeping track of
where we were that we are still trying to recover from. L Also, we did still
charge on our credit card. Of course I also hate that several hundreds of
dollars went towards interest on our credit instead of towards the principal.
Because we are owed some money, we didn’t decrease our balance on our credit
card as much as I would have liked. It’s actually a little depressing to see
how long we have been on this roller coaster called debt freedom. We made some
poor choices and have been living in a debt cycle for too long!
Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $15,000
and keeping it that way, also making continued progress on our car loan. I’m
also looking forward to staying on the debt pay-off and blogging band wagon! I
was off of it for too long and it feels good to be making progress again! If we
have an exceptionally good month of debt payoff, we should be able to get down
into the $13Ks with our credit card debt. (It’s so crazy to say that I would be
excited to be in the $13K range!) Hopefully, we will be paid back by the people
who owe us money and we will be able to send that money right to the credit
card. I am also looking forward to getting our total debt below $17,000 and
maybe falling somewhere in the $15K range for our total debt if we have another
good month of payoff. The most difficult part of this plan is the timing. We
are inching nearer and nearer to Christmas: the most expensive time of the
year. I have a little “Christmas nest egg” but I don’t know how far it’s going
to carry us. I still have a lot of presents to buy, a party to plan for, and
traditions to keep. We’ll see how we do.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment