Saturday, February 7, 2009

February Update

March will mark one year that I've been really paying attention to our debt and working hard to get it paid off. Before March, I avoided it, because it was pretty depressing to see no progress at all. My wife graduated a few months later and started receiving full paychecks. I'm glad to report that as of writing this, we have paid off four of our seven credit cards, and the fifth will probably be paid off with the next paycheck. We still have a Mastercard and Discover card which are the big ones, but the debt snowball has been working and I think they'll be gone soon too.

A word on the debt payoff strategy...for my money, the debt snowball is the only way to go. I had my doubts, but once I started seeing zero balances, I got that much more excited.

So, now that the end is actually in sight (I haven't had zero credit card debt since college in the 90s), I have to start focusing on the rest of our debt. So, I added them to my debt snowball chart, and found that between our car loan (which will be the first to go once the credit cards are gone) and our student loans, we owe $266,500. This doesn't include our mortgage, because I don't to be too overwhelmed.

So, once our credit cards are no more and will never see another transaction, I plan to pay off the car, then my student loans, and then my wife's student loans.

With God's help, we can attack those and see them beaten also.