get out of debt

Had a couple of hiccups over the past few months and my car just blew the engine but still feel pretty good about things. Ended up with a couple of small debts, but we are working on it. If the cars will quit blowing up for one reason or another we will meet thins goal within the next year or so.

Apparently cows are not liable for walking out in front of your car, so since we only carried liability insurance on the car we ran into the cow with, we will not be getting anything to help replace it with. I did find a really decent car with not too bad a price tag on it. Now it’s just a matter of seeing if we can get it financed. Didn’t want a new debt, but it’s not like we have cash to pull out of our ass to just go out and buy one.

Got the estimate on the heat and air. Of course it is double what we had thought we could do it for. $10,000. The positive of it is that it will be much much much more efficient and will save us a ton of energy use, which also means it will save us a ton of money. The system that has been in our house isn’t even right so once we change it out those outrageous bills we get in the winter and the summer should be much much better. No WONDER everything we have tried to do has made no difference. We have insulated, spray foam insulated, put those little insulation things behind the outlets, installed a couple of new windows, etc. Nothing ever makes any difference to our energy bill. Heat guy said its our stupid system that is the culprit.

Hubby got a promotion and a really decent raise so we are sitting down to budget exactly how we are going to do all of this. For the next year it looks like the raise is going to be eaten up by the heat/air system and the car, but after that it will make a huge difference to our lives. I can complain that we wont’ see a big difference this year because of the added expenses or I can be happy that at least we will be able to do what needs to be done because he got the raise. For today I’m going to choose to be happy.

We are thinking that if we can suck it up and live with one vehicle for the rest of the summer we can at least make some progress on the student loans etc, then once school is getting ready to start go ahead and get the car. We do think that getting the air installed before the worst of the summer hits is the smarter thing to do though.

The last bit of news is that it looks like the bank is going to seriously consider refinancing the house and the heat/air will help with the overall value of the house. We are getting screwed on our house payments and if the refinance works out it will literally save us around $400 a month. Crazy huh?

Have to buy a car because ours is totaled. We got a really good deal on it and paid cash when we bought it but I doubt we are going to get enough money from insurance to be able to replace it with something as good as we had. Our heater and air conditioner is out and needs to be completely replaced, so that’s $5000 right there. Can we say that this hasn’t exactly been our month?

All we have is our house and student loans. Getting started on repaying the student loans. Once those are paid off then we’ll start sending that money to the mortgage company and see how quick we can get this sucker paid off. We have credit cards but we don’t go shopping crazy with them and we pay them off every month. We were thinking of buying a new car this year but have decided to do a little fix up on the ones we have and take the next year to fix up our house and see how close we can get to the debt free mark. Figure now is a good time before the economy falls completely apart. If that happens and we don’t have a bunch of debt then maybe it won’t suck as bad as I remember from the 80’s.