As you know, life went topsy-turvy and I was a horrible
blogger and an even worse budgeter towards the end of last year. As I’ve
probably written 25 times, I want to get better. I want to get out of debt. I
want to blog more consistently. Here is my attempt, if a little late.
I’m a little bummed because this update, though good, is
going to shed some light on our horrible back-sliding from the month of
December. We are still picking up the pieces from Christmas and probably will
be for about 4 more months. (No, it wasn’t worth it. Yes, I regret it. Yes, I
made it a goal to do better this year!)
This debt update is based on our current totals from our
last credit card statement. I’m just being real and trying to be transparent. 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 and I don’t have to take into account when our debt
cycle closes!
Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I
would like, I am happy to say that for the first time in 3 months, 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:
$17,570.60 Credit Card at 16.74%
interest
$295.00
Car Loan at 0% interest
Our total debt stands at: $17,865.60 YIKES! It’s a lot of
debt. 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. (As an
aside, ironically, our overall debt didn’t grow too much from our last update,
but it is still above our last total. Our credit card debt increased but with
our continued monthly payments for the car loan, they almost cancelled each
other out.)
Plus side: we started actively tracking our debt again! Our
debt decreased! We paid off $2613.16 of credit card debt and another $350
towards our car loan for a total of $2963.16 paid towards debt, which amounted
to 14.2% of our total debt. The fact that we haven’t borrowed any more money
from The Kids is still a plus to me. We continue to make progress towards our
retirement and to contribute $50 a month to our kids’ bank accounts. We only
have 1 car payment left at the end of this month and The Husband’s car is all
paid off!!!
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! 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 $17,000
(☹) 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! I am also looking forward
to getting our total debt below $17,000. I know I said this earlier, but I’m
really excited to only have one car payment left!
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.
I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful,
and beyond successful!
No comments:
Post a Comment