As you know, life went topsy-turvy for the whole world
during this last month! I’m sorry my debt update is so late, but blogging has
taken a backseat during this time. The Covid19 virus has changed the life of so
many people! Us included. It has been an interesting 3 weeks with several more
to come. Writing for my blog has not been my priority, but I wanted to update
you all on my progress, what there was of it.
This debt update is based on our February
update. 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! Due to
life going sideways, home quarantining, and social distancing, this update is a
little late. But, better late than not at all!
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! It didn’t decrease by leaps and bounds, but we did make
progress so I have to take my wins where I can get them.
Here are our current debt totals:
$17,284.94 Credit
Card at 16.74% interest
$0 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 $285.66 of credit card debt and $295 of car debt,
for a total of $580.66; that only amounted to 3.3% 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 paid off our car!!!!! We are down to “just” one
debt. I know it’s a biggie, but it’s exciting to be down to only one debt!
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.
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 that we paid our car off!!! We
have two, reliable, paid for cars and no car payment! Last time we paid off a
car, we had to buy one for The Husband the very next month and didn’t get to
enjoy having no car payment for even one month!
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!
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