First Week of October Update

Many, many things happened this week, so this is one of the biggest updates I’ve had to date.

First of all, we dropped below the $10,000 in credit card debt threshold!!  It has been about 8 years since I’ve had less than $10k in credit card debt, so this is a HUGE deal for us!  We are VERY excited about getting our debt paid down, but also very relieved and fired up at the progress we are making every month now.  We are really, really seeing the results of the snowball at this point!  Every week we are making as much progress as we made in a month when we first started.  Several factors have helped this – the income increasing has been a major factor in that, but staying focused on getting out of debt, and keeping the budget lean has been as much help as anything else, too.

So, we started this week with a balance of $5,802.24.  We got hit with the bill, so interest charges hit, but we dropped our minimum payment by about $25 last month.  Not too bad, but I hope to do much, much better this month.

We are now sitting at a balance of $5,357.69, meaning we’ve paid $444.55.  That’s a pretty good jumpstart to our plan, since we have 5 weeks in the month.  If we can keep pace with that, we should pay off just over $2200, and that brings us within about $200 of our goal.

I got the part time job at Wal-mart, and go in for orientation for a full day on Saturday.  Also, my wife got a full time job at Panera Bread, working mornings, Monday through Friday, so that is really going to help things out!

This is already shaping up to be a MUCH better month than last…