December Goals

This month, we start saving more than we pay off debt, since the birth will cost a decent amount, so our goals will be simpler.  In addition, I am seriously considering dropping my second job this month, and my wife has already quit her second job.  As well, her primary job may be somewhat thin this month due to the holidays, so her primary income may see a decrease.

With Christmas coming up later this month, and all the parties, gift-giving, and added expenses that will inevitably hit, I’m going to set what I feel to be conservative goals, and don’t really plan to spend any more than that.

The goals for this month are simple:  Get the last credit card down to a balance of $3,000.

To do that, we will have to pay off approximately $1,500, less than half of what we paid off in November.

I am still flip-flopping between paying the student loan off next or attacking the next smallest debt, which would be the truck.  Of course, my updates may get fairly sparse, since most of our extra income will go to saving up for the baby, rather than debt reduction, especially after the last credit card is gone, and possibly starting as early as next month.

Fourth Week of November Update: Thanksgiving Edition

Well, it is done.  Three thousand two hundred forty-nine dollars and sixty nine cents later, we have PAID OFF THE AMERICAN EXPRESS CARD!!  This was the card with our highest balance, over $10,000, when we started this process less than 2 years ago!

We have so very much to be thankful for – in a time of economic distress around the country, we were able to hold down two jobs each and totally blow away our goals and completely pay off a credit card!  We now have less than $4,500 worth of credit card debt, and have less than $43,000 combined.

With the wife pregnant, and her second job disappearing, I expect that our last 4 debts will take a while to knock out, but it is worth it to just get rid a card that I have carried a very high balance on for over two years.

We beat our goal this month by over $1,200, due mostly in part to our secondary jobs making more than anticipated.  Probably sometime after Thanksgiving, I’ll write down our December goals, but I can already tell that it isn’t going to be near as aggressive as November was.

Stay tuned & Happy Thanksgiving!!

Third Week of November Update

This was a pretty good week, in that we paid off $356.00 worth of debt, but it was an even better week, as we passed several milestones.  For the first time in forever, our credit cards have less than a $6,000 balance, and our total debt is now under $44,000 total.  That means that in 23 months, we have paid over $34,000 in debt.  That’s only averaging just under $1,500 a month, and with these updates, you are seeing the phenomenal progress we are making now, so that tells you just how little progress we were making at the beginning of this…

We got some news yesterday about my wife’s primary job.  She’s a nanny, and with the Thanksgiving break coming up, she won’t be needed the entire week next week, so that will cut our progress in December, but with all our income considered, we should still pay our American Express Credit card off this month!  (If we get within a few hundred dollars, I’m going to preemptively send the money in, just to avoid having an interest payment to make in January…)

This month, so far, we’ve paid $1,967.39 off of the American Express.  We will break $2,000 easily this month, and will approach $3,000 by the Thanksgiving update!  That is definitely something to be thankful for!

More Changes…

Well, my wife put in her notice at her second job, so she’ll be done the day before Thanksgiving.  I think that will allow us to pay off the AmEx before her checks are finished coming from that job, and it was only an extra $150/week, but it does slow some things down.

You will notice that we almost got within $100 of our goal for the month this week, meaning that next week’s checks are mostly gravy.  We would have beaten it this week, but I re-arranged our finances to go ahead and start allocating money towards the pregnancy, rather than throwing everything at the debt.  I only pulled back a little, though, so our AmEx should be taken care of by the second week in December – still an accomplishment in itself.

I’m getting very tired, and really look forward to the time that I don’t have but a single job again, but I know that pushing forward and really dealing with our credit card debt is going to have us going into the new year in a much better position than last year was…  And don’t get me wrong, in this day with the economic downturn, weakening economy, high unemployment, etc., I count my blessings – I’m just ready to quit paying “stupid tax”.

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.)