pay off my debt

Reading over my past entries on this goal, I see that things didn’t go exactly as planned, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t going great. We didn’t end up paying off Dell. We had a few things come up one after the other that prevented us from making much progress toward the end of last year. However, we are humming along again.

Last week, we paid off a loan that was a $233/month payment and found out we’re getting $1000 on our taxes (as opposed to owing $1300 like last year). As soon as our refund is direct deposited, we’ll be able to pay off another loan that has a $140/month payment.

I can’t wait for the day when the only bills we have every month are a mortgage and utilities. I hope everyone else is hanging in on this goal!

I just scheduled a payment to pay off the balance of our Chase card. Once the payment pulls on Saturday, that’ll be $110 monthly we can apply elsewhere. WOOHOO!

HAPPY MONEY DANCE! HAPPY MONEY DANCE! HAPPY MONEY DANCE!

Tomorrow, I’m calling Dell to make a $100 payment and then transfer the remaining balance to Wells Fargo for the lower interest rate. Then I’m calling Wells to up our monthly payment from $42 to $150!

MORE HAPPY MONEY DANCE!

I can’t believe how excited I get over this stuff, but it’s such a tingling, liberating feeling to know another one has bitten the dust!

Now I’m off to do yoga before I lose this high…

Thanks to our stimulus check and both my hubby and I getting big raises, we were able to make a $400 payment on one of our two remaining credit cards this week. YEA! When we get paid again (8/15), we’ll be able to pay it off! YEA! I know you guys won’t be able to see it, but believe me when I say I’ll be doing the Happy Money Dance.

Also, our other remaining credit card raised our limit by $1000, so we’re transferring the balance from our Dell account (my laptop) to that card because the interest rate is 9.5% less. YEA!

Our goal is to pay off everything except our student loans (which will probably haunt us indefinitely) before moving to Florida. I don’t know if we can actually do this, but we’re going to get as close as we possibly can.

Hope everyone else is doing well on this goal too! =^)

My mom is amazing. Despite the hell she’s going through with her divorce, she’s still managed to help my youngest brother sell his house, my middle brother and his girlfriend get new cars before theirs die, and Chris and me continue working toward being debt-free by the end of the year. This weekend, she came over to help us fill out our tax forms, which we assumed included the extension form to give us 6 more months to scrounge up the $1300 we owed. Instead, she wrote a check for the whole amount and wouldn’t let us talk her out of it. This is such a huge weight off my mind. I told her we’d pay her back when we get our stimulus checks, but she wants us to put that money in savings toward our moving expenses. She’s awesome.

Also, we pulled our credit reports again yesterday. Since the beginning of December, mine has gone up 73 points, and Chris’s has gone up 123. Isn’t that unreal? I did a little happy dance in the kitchen. =^)

Hope everyone else is doing as well as we were. Take it easy.

I found out last night that we’re going to owe about $1300 in taxes. We both got significant pay raises over the past year and had no idea our employers wasn’t withholding enough… not by a long shot, evidently. So this puts a speed bump in the road to pay off all our debt, but the good news is that we’ll probably be able to get the money together without TOO much trouble because of the bills we’ve already paid off (with and without my mom’s help).

Sometimes it just feels like every time we make a little progress, we get kicked in the teeth again. I mean, $1300? Are you kidding me?

We met with Mom again tonight, and we’re making FANTASTIC progress toward paying off our debt… and it’s only February! It’s amazing how much progress you can make when your mother throws money at your problems!

Seriously though, I’ve told her about a thousand times now how much we appreciate the help. It’s so nice to pay all our bills and still have money left over for things like gas and groceries. =^)

The debt-reduction plan my mom has devised for us is really working. We’re making HUGE progress toward getting our debt paid off, and I couldn’t be happier. Between my new job’s salary (about $5000/year more than I was making before) and my mom’s insanity, we may actually make her goal of being debt-free by 2009. In fact, we may be able to pay everything off well before the end of the year. I come home every day and open Microsoft Money and just STARE at the amount of money we have left over after paying all our bills. I’m so glad I decided to get involved in the finances again. I stayed out of it for so long because it stressed me out to see how crappy it was, but in the past six months or so, I think it’s actually been more stressful NOT having a hand in it.

Okay, so the hubby and I have been chipping away at our mountain of debt for about five years, but it seems like we haven’t made very much progress. (He assures me that we have, but I’ve intentionally been uninvolved with the finances because it stresses me out so much.) Now my mom is determined to see us debt-free by 2009. So far, she’s thrown about $8000 at the aforementioned mountain, which has freed us up to start making some SERIOUS payments toward the rest of it. I’m so psyched I can hardly sit still. It’s so nice not to cringe every time the phone rings because it MIGHT be a creditor. At this rate, we will definitely be debt-free by the end of the year, including the money we both owe EIU, which means we can go back to school as well as move out of state. I never realized how much of my life was on hold because of the money situation.