Finances & Money

$64,761 of debt down and…

only $48,129 left to go!

That’s our chart from the No Credit Needed Network (thanks NCN!). The “Paid” numbers are a bit off since I began the chart well into our debt repayment period.

Yeah, that’s a lot of debt, but here’s the thing. Now that we paid off all our credit card debt, the rest seems like child’s play. Why? Because I know we can do it!

We had $20,000+ of credit card debt following us (me) for the last 6+ years. I tried to escape from it by just transferring it from one 0% offer to another, but this time I had to face the music. Our current offer is up in November, and I don’t know if I could have found a home for the $12,000 balance I originally had remaining. Credit card companies are removing balance transfer caps, so I no longer had the option of paying just $50-75 each 6-12 months to move the debt around to another card. So, I decided to pay it off, without digging into our savings.

But what’s amazing is how much we’ve paid off in so little time! Since August 2nd, when I posted “When you put your mind to it…“, we paid off an additional $6,000 worth of debt! That’s about $1,000 per week EXTRA towards our debt! And that’s while we paid all our other bills and even bought a Wii. This summer, we slashed 2 out of 5 of our debts: credit cards and Chevy Malibu (which we just sold last month). Oh, and I put $10,000 from the car sale into our savings for a future car for Stacie.

So what’s left? We have 2 student loans and my Honda Ridgeline loan left to pay off. I’ll be tackling my own student loan first as it’s the highest interest rate, but I also need to reassess our savings,tax, and retirement contributions. As much as would like to just get rid of all our debt, I don’t want to do it at the expense of our cash reserves. Also, I’m worried that we’ll underpay in taxes this year (we almost did last year), so I need to sit down with the calculator to determine how much extra I should have taken out of my paycheck this year, and how many withholdings to claim for next year.

I’ll be writing up a post with some more details about our short-term future plans, and how we expect to make the numbers fit while still enjoying ourselves. Both Stacie and I have 3 weeks or more in vacation saved up, so we really need to do something for ourselves. However, we want to do something BIG, but you’ll have to wait to find out what.