Second Week of November

This was an excellent week!  We made HUGE strides towards our goal, mostly through the combination of getting checks from both of our secondary jobs in the bank in time to make the payments this week.

I hadn’t considered that my second job wasn’t really going to slow down for a couple of weeks, even though I changed my availability, so I have already made more than I thought I would, and I still have another paycheck this month to apply against it.  My wife also got a pretty good paycheck, so she only has $100 left to earn this month from that, and she should beat that, probably by $100 or so.  Alternatively, however, I didn’t take into account Thanksgiving, and the effect that would have on her primary job, so there may be some reduced income there.  We should still beat our goal, even if only by a few hundred dollars, but we’ll see…

So here’s our Debt Reduction Update:

We started the month with a balance of $3,249.69 on the American Express card, and worked it down to $2,721.30 last week.  This week, the balance on the card is $1,638.30, meaning that we have paid $1,083 off of the card this week!!  This is, by far, our biggest week in debt reduction EVER!  It helped to have 4 paychecks and a vehicle reimbursement check hit just right, but we have already absolutely SLAMMED the American Express and paid off 50% of the balance left on it, and we’ve only had two weeks worth of work on it!

Of course, next week won’t be as drastic a reduction as either week 1 or 2 was, but we should still see at least $300 worth of progress, and that puts us within just a $150 or so of our goal for the month.  Then, week 4, Thanksgiving week, we should see another spike in our payoff (again with 4 paychecks) and that should be another $600-700, beating our goal by $500 or so, and leaving less than $1,000 on the credit card.  The first week of December should pay that off, and then we can re-evaluate where to go from there.

My current thought is to begin socking money away, rather than paying off the final credit card, but a lot of effort to this point has gone into getting rid of the cards, and I hate to leave that last one lingering, especially if we can take it out in a couple of months (which, given the progress we’ve made the last two, that sounds like an achievable goal.)