Category: Debt Free Journey

Week 28, 2019

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No paychecks this week but we did have my husbands tips. I also moved some money around to cover the makeup purchase because the overspent notication on YNAB on my phone was driving me crazy. I covered the overspending with money I had already budgetted towards other bills, which aren’t due until after me and my husband get paid next week.

I also made a new purchase this week. When hubby and I started dating back in 2010 I was going to the nail salon every 2 weeks and getting acrylic nails put on. I loved this. I also was spending $40 each visit. When I was a single person with the only debt being my student loans, which were on income based repayment, this wasn’t a huge deal. I made it through in my own apartment, paying my own bills. But as soon as we got married and started taking on the debt we took on together, I stopped going to help fund all of our minimum payments, going out, yadda yadda, yadda.

So for the last couple of months (probably 6) I was getting really tired of me chewing my nails into non-existence EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. So I started buying nail polishes that last me a while. I would sit down every Saturday, remove polish, file nails to the square shape I like, and repaint them. The issue is, my nails are super crappy. They break pretty easy, so I had to buy some hardening nail polish to help with that. They still break but they are definitely thicker.

Well, this week, after watching a bazillion makeup tutorials last week where ALL the girls have these super long, beautiful false nails, I decided I’d like to try it again. However, I am not willing to spend the $40 every couple of weeks, there had to be a way to do it the budget friendly way. Enter KISS nails. I found out that I can get these at my local Walmart for around $6 and they are already painted and cute. So while me and my daughter were grocery shopping, I let her pick the color I would have.

I then watched a TON of videos on the best way to apply these, pre-applied backing only, add glue, use the kind where you have to glue, on and on and on, there are a ton of tutorials on YouTube for this stuff. I also found someone on Poshmark selling 13 sets for half price, so I went ahead and stocked up on these to last me a while.

Last night I applied my first set, with just the pre-applied backing, we’ll see how long they last. Also, I think I am going to alternate applications between these already colored nails and some paint yourself nails so I can keep using up my already purchased nail polish. These sets are also cheaper (You can get 20 sets for $20 on Amazon). So I’ll keep you updated on how long these stay on. I also purchased some glue in case I have to reapply some of these nails if they fall off.

So overall budgetting wise, not a lot to report. Saving myself $34 by doing my nails at home, definitely a good budget move!

Week 27, 2019

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We didn’t have any debt payments this week but we did make some purchases.

We have taken the stance of we would rather take a little longer to pay off debt and still get to live life in between. We will not take on any new debt, but we will be using credit cards to keep our score up. Most cards will have one of our recurring bills on them each month, which we will pay off each month. And one card may have some little purchases here and there.

My purchase this week was not exactly little but it definitely did not come close to maxing out the card. I am the type of person that only buys makeup once in a blue moon and then waits until it runs out before buying more. Unfortunately for my budget, I ran out of everything last week. I still had some eyeshadow and brow pencil but everything else was gone. My mom has just gotten a job at Ulta so for the first time, I bought makeup somewhere besides Walmart.

Two of her co-workers matched my face and helped me pick out the best products for me. I also was shown how to contour and purchased some stuff for doing that for the first time ever. I also spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos to help me out a little more with learning how to apply this stuff.

Overall, spending upwards of $300 on makeup is a lot, but considering I will not need to purchase again for a very long time, I’m okay with it. Also, this is a 3 paycheck month for my husband so we will have the money to pay the card off in full at the end of the month, before the due date.

We choose to be Dave-ish, and that’s okay with us. We will take on a little debt for the short term but will pay off every month, and we will take vacations when we want to, as long as we cash flow.

This month should still give us a large snowflake payment for the month, upwards of $700 I am estimating. We will be paying down our consolidation loan first to avalanche our debt away.

Also, I changed my mind on aging our money. I want to put as much as we can each month towards debt, and the way we are paying bills now has been working for us all year. So we will keep with the 15th to the 14th schedule of bills I talked about in my last post.

Here’s to July!

Week 26, 2019 & June Payoff

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This week was the last week of June. Last week of the month means snowball payment and final numbers for the month.

We were able to make a snowball payment to finish off paying the last credit card off. Also, all of our payments processed for the other payments I had made last week so 4 of our cards are currently showing a $0 balance. The 5th card still shows a balance because the payment has not cleared yet, but should by tomorrow.

Our paid-off numbers would have been slightly better if we didn’t have the origination fee for the loan we took out BUT, I am okay with this because I know the savings for the interest are going to be huge for our overall debt payoff adventure.

I have also been playing around in YNAB and I am going to work to slowly push out our age of money. Hubby gets paid bi-weekly and I get paid twice a month. Because of this I plan all of our bills as follows: I get paid on the 15th every month so I make sure with this check that all of our bills except the mortgage are paid through the 15th of next month. With the check I get at the end of the month, I am able to pay the mortgage and the majority of our snowball payment comes from this. With hubby’s checks and tips I also pay off bills and am able to add to the snowball payment.

This month is a month where hubby gets an extra check. So I figured I would take advantage of that and work towards getting all bills paid through the end of the month so I can be one full month ahead on all of my bills. I will probably do this slowly to not slow our debt payoff. I plan to push out bills one day per month until I am able to completely fund next month with this month’s checks. So, next month all bills will be paid through the 16th and that will help us get set up, we will also still be able to make a substantial debt payment, pending any Murphy visits.

I am so excited to have the cards paid off, even though technically the money just got moved somewhere else, we will be saving a TON on interest!

Here’s to another month!

Total amount paid off for June was $560.02!

Let’s have a GIANT July!

Week 25, 2019

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We have been trucking along getting debt paid off.

We had a vacation weekend last weekend so we had some money set aside to do some fun things with the family. It was a staycation so no hotels to pay for or anything. It was super fun. Went to the aquarium with my daughter, went hiking, and went to the movies with my daughter. It was all relatively inexpensive and we had a good time.

Later in the week my husband received his 1,000th offer for a loan to consolidate credit cards. I know what Dave Ramsey says on the topic “It’s just moving money around,” “It doesn’t solve the spending problem,” and on and on. A couple things I have noticed while we have been actually serious about paying down debt this year is that our credit card interest rates are CRAZY! We are paying tons of money in interest each month. So I thought, let’s just see what kind of rates are offered and if we can get enough to pay off our credit cards.

Keep in mind, we have successfully not used our credit cards since last year. They are no longer in my wallet. We do still have them open but do not intend to use them. We have been paying 17.99-26.99% interest on each card. We have 5 cards. We have over $21,000 in credit card debt alone. All of this tells me that we should pay those suckers off ASAP.

So I applied. I had applied about a year ago and we were denied due to “balance on revolving credit too high.” But I hoped that this time would be different. The one we had received an offer for was approved BUT the payments were going to be about $100 more than our current payments AND it was only going to pay off 3 1/2 of the 5 cards so more per month and I was still going to have to make payments on 2 cards. Not ideal.

I did my research, applied for a few others, was turned down for a few others and finally got approved for one that was PERFECT. It is about $100 less than our current minimum payments. We got approved for enough to pay off all but about $800 which we should be able to completely payoff by the end of next week. The interest rate is also 15.99% which is less than we are paying on all of our credit cards.

We got the money within 2 days and I have already dispursed to the cards the money needs to go on.

While this may not be a Dave approved decision, this is going to be what’s best for our family. I truly feel that we have kicked our spending problem in the teeth and we are truly ready to get all of this debt taken care of. This loan will help us save $1,000s in interest.

Our plan going forward is to continue paying highest interest rate first. So this loan will be the first thing we throw money towards. We are super excited to see where our lives take us once we have all of our debt paid off!

Week 18, 2019

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Wow, we are into May already!

Our debt plan took a bit of a detour for April. We were going to be taking a trip at the beginning of May. We like to visit my in laws at least once a year, we camp on their property so all we need is gas for the trip there and we split up food costs while we are there. So overall, the trip costs us $300-$400 altogether. We did not make a big debt payment in April because we saved our snowball money to cash flow our trip.

I cannot tell you the relief I felt at being able to cash flow this trip. We have never taken this trip without fully funding it with credit cards. We have never taken this trip without MAXING OUT our credit cards by the time we get home. We have never taken this trip with a budget in mind.

This time around was different. Every purchase we made was thought out, we always weighed it with the thought of, the more unnecessary spending we have, the less we can send to a credit card when we get home.

Overall, the trip was so much fun! We just spent some time in a new environment, away from our usual worries and such. Our daughter got to have fun playing with her cousin. And the best part? We were still able to make a snowball payment of over $500!

Our credit card of focus is now under $2,000!

I have a trip in the middle of June so we will be taking the same approach with May’s snowball payment. We need to knuckle down on our grocery spending a little more this month, we did go over a little during April. So our focus for May is to stick to our budget and then save our snowball to cash flow my next trip. Then we shouldn’t have anymore trips for a while.

I think we will go see our family again in September but by then we should have our first credit card paid off!

Our current baby step 2 balance is $50,740.77! Which means we have paid off almost $5,000 this year!

Week 13, 2019

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This week was the 1st of the month which is when I plan to do all of our snowball payments. We had a large amount of money to put toward it since we received a escrow refund check for switching home owners insurance providers.

We also cash flowed new tires for hubby’s car, new glasses, dentist appointments, and a few other things we weren’t expecting. The important thing is, we CASH FLOWED all of these rather than needing to touch the emergency fund.

With YNAB I have also been putting aside money for pesky expenses that I would usually ignore until the expense came up like domain renewals, xbox memberships, and other things that I would just charge to the credit card and forget about. I moved all memberships that I knew of to our new account equipped to handle these expenses. We have also started setting aside money to help with car repairs as they come up and my daughter’s homeschool curriculum.

I feel so much better equipped to handle whatever life may throw at me. It’s a good thing we have been used to not spending money on frivolous things for a while, because we have already gotten a handle on not having crazy expenses. We have been avoiding credit cards for the most part for years.

We were able to send a substantial amount of money towards debt this month. We sent a total of $2,364.64 to debt. This includes all debt payments. We were able to reduce our baby step 2 amount by $1,969.26 for the month.

We will be taking a trip at the beginning of May so we will pause our snowball amount until we know how much that trip is going to cost. We are camping on our family’s property so we only need to pay for gas to get there and home and food while we are there. Overall the trip shouldn’t cost more than a couple hundred dollars. This trip will be to celebrate my husband’s birthday.

We are so excited to be on this journey and to finally be making a dent in our debt!

Week 11, 2019

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I spent last weekend learning a new budgetting software. I have decided to switch to YNAB (You Need a Budget) after reading the book. The plan of this program really makes sense to me, making sure to budget between now and when your next paycheck is due really makes sense to me. So I have changed our plan for how we pay for bills. This month will be another giant one for debt payoff numbers because I am paying all bills due between now and the 15th when my next big check comes in.

I also loaded all of my debts into Undebt.it, which for $12 a year syncs with the YNAB numbers and payments so I do not have to double enter anything. This makes my life WAY easier.

We have had quite a few expenses this week. Hubby told me that he needed new tires on the car he uses for his delivery job. That ran us about $400 and drained the money we had set aside for Car Repairs.

We also were given a go kart that hubby is fixing up, so we put about $30 into parts to get the engine up and running again.

Hubby also finally got the parts put on my car to get it to pass inspection, so we funded an inspection and registration renewal on my car.

When I was setting up YNAB I noticed a transaction on our mortgage account that said “Escrow Refund.” The last time we got one of these, we ended up getting the review statement a few months later and found out we were actually going to owe more money in, our mortgage payment has gone up over the last couple of years to make up for shortages and we have not gotten a refund check since the first year we lived here. I knew our review came in March so I waited patiently for the letter, which was uploaded this week and we received in the mail as well. Turns out that since we changed our homeowners insurance we actually did receive a refund AND our mortgage payment is going DOWN by $100, which will help fund some sinking funds each month and to payoff debt.

I really like the plan of YNAB and the sinking funds. I do not like their recommendation of keeping everything in one account though, I opened separate savings accounts with Capital One to keep the different sinking funds in. I have one for Andria’s Homeschool Curriculum, Car Repairs, and one for all of our digital subscriptions that we pay on a yearly basis.

We are already making the plan for next month and what we need to do to help fund our trip to Missouri coming in May. The plan for groceries will be to stay as low as possible on groceries each week to help for groceries on the trip, we are also planning foods that won’t cost us a lot, like sandwiches, for in the car on the road. When we go we stay on my in-laws property, camping, and everyone that goes splits the cost of groceries.

We will also be holding our snowball payment until after we get back to make sure that we have enough money to fund gas and such while we are gone. We will be cash flowing this trip for sure! I think this is the first time that we will be making this trip without using credit. I will not even have our cards with us!

Going into the last week of the month, I have all bills paid or budgeted for through the 15th of next month except our mortgage which will come out of my paycheck on the 19th, it is very freeing. We have been able to fund Jonathan’s early birthday present of a new Xbox, and anything we make in this next week will be thrown into debt.

Week 10, 2019 & Our Story

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Okay, I am going to start labeling with what Monday of the year we are on. So we started our journey again in January of this year. So we are on the 10th Monday of 2019. All of my numbers are based on what they were at the beginning of the month.

A little of our journey. We started attempting to pay off debt in 2012 after we got married. I went to a private college and had only paid the minimum amounts on my student loans. I have no idea what the original balances was. I was also on income based repayment for most of the time so my interest just kept stacking up. Then we put most of our wedding on credit cards. Hubby also had a credit card that he had at the limit for the entire time he had it. He would pay some and then he would charge it up again.

So we moved in with my parents at the end of 2013, all in the name of saving up a down payment for a house and paying off some debt. We were able to pay off two cards, to the tune of about $1,000 but, we did a poor job of saving money. We spent almost everything we had saved over the course of the year we lived with them. In November of 2013 I received a lawsuit settlement for some medical issues. We used this money as the down payment to the house we now live in.

So fast forward to 2016, I decided to actually start a spreadsheet with our debt numbers on it in January. Our savings balance was $584.35, baby step 2 balance $41,957.16, all debt including house $144,123.39. In general, we did not do a good job of extra payment. Hubby works in delivery and his 20 year old car was going to need a new transmission, so we shopped around and got a good deal on a used car. Enter a new car loan. We also paid off 2 student loans during this year.

January 2017, savings balance $140.94, baby step 2 balance $60,252.61, all debt including house $160,432.04. We INCREASED our debt by $16,308.65 for the year. Not a good year. We also cash flowed a cruise during this year. Some may have been put on credit cards, I really can’t remember.

January 2018, savings balance $179.71, baby step 2 balance $57,919.46, all debt including house $156,211.13. I was actually proud of the beginning of this year. We were able to reduce our debt by $4,220.91 from the year before. We were still very much using credit cards. We had not fully committed to any debt free plan. We also took a vacation that was not budgeted, completely charged up all of our credit cards again, and missed 4 credit card payments. Let me tell you, they will call you EVERY SINGLE DAY until you catch those things up.

Finally January 2019, we have committed to following Dave Ramsey. We have committed to being debt free except the house in 2 years. We are tired of not having any money to spend. I take ALL credit cards out of my wallet for the first time EVER! Savings balance $177.78, baby step 2 balance $55,363.85, all debt including house $151,492.18. We were able to pay off $4,718.95 in the previous 12 months. Now it’s time to get serious! No more debt. Cash flow everything. Get a snowball plan in place. Unlike with Dave, we are following a avalanche strategy. Some of our credit cards have 26.99% interest. I am much more interested in paying the least amount of interest than I care about quick wins.

At some point over the years we lived in our house, we got behind on mortgage payments. We always paid them by the last minute due date but, it was always 2 weeks behind when the payment was actually due. So in January we were able to put a small amount into savings.

February 2019, savings $336.18, baby step 2 total $54,971.51, all debt including house total $150,918.23, for a paid off amount of $573.95 overall from January to February. We got our tax return in February so we were able to catch up on the rest of the missed credit card payments, make a double payment on our mortgage to get caught back up and making future payments on time, and we were able to fully fund our $1,000 baby emergency fund.

March 2019, savings $1,000.05, baby step 2 total $53,773.68, all debt including house total $149,355.47 for a total paid off from February to March of $1,562.76. We are obviously still in March but this is the most hopeful I have been for our financial future. We have been talking about where we want to move once all our debts are paid off. Along with what we want to be able to do. We are making plans together. We are discussing things together. I can’t wait to see what we can get done!

Another Monday, Another Payment

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Every Monday I have a pattern, I update my spending trackers (Google Sheet and EveryDollar) and then I open my Google Calendar that has all my bills on it, mark bills that directly pull from my account on my Google Sheet and then pay the ones that I do manually.

This week I sent $159.02 to MyFedLoan, this payment covers 5 individual loans.

I also set up to start this month, my grocery and gas money to automatically transfer from my bills account to my grocery & gas account. Carrying around that much cash scares me, so we have a separate account that holds our grocery and gas money. I also set to automatically transfer the monthly amount for Andria’s school sinking fund. We homeschool so this is the first year I am creating a monthly budget item for her school work for next year.

We also have an account for car repairs. Currently this account will get any gas overages for the month and every transaction we have on our accounts will automatically transfer $1, which keeps this account growing. With gas prices rising for the summer and hubby being a delivery driver, I will probably have to up our gas budget in the future but for now it seems to work for us.

With the Emergency Fund finished I am so excited to finally see our payments to debt increasing. We have been paying minimums but this month we should get to send a sizable payment to our first credit card on the list.

Our current debt sits at:

Credit Card Debt $24,595.15

Student Loan Debt $20,014.72

Car Debt $9,181.98

Total $53,791.85

We also have a mortgage of $95,581.79

Our current plan is to pay off all of our non-mortgage debts, stay in our house for up to another year and save like crazy, and then to buy land and build a house. This plan may change but, for now that is the plan. We are excited to finish this journey. It should take us around 2 years with our income to pay this off. Let’s see what happens!

February 2019 Ends

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As another month came to an end, we closed out our budget for the month.

It was a super productive month. We got a tax return in, and with it we were able to catch up our missed credit card payments from October all the way. We were also able to make a double mortgage payment which allowed us to pay our mortgage on time for the first time in over 2 years (We have been paying on the 15th which is the last possible day). We were also able to finish off our $1,000 Emergency Fund.

Like I said, it was a productive month.

I always start next month’s budget at the beginning of this month, so I have a good idea of what March’s numbers are going to be. Now that it is March 1st, I also have a good idea of what April’s numbers will be, I just have to plug in variable expenses, like electricity and water, and then that month is good to go as well.

In March we are officially starting our debt snowball. We have a couple of car repairs that will need to happen so my car can pass inspection but, after that we should have a sizable snowball for the month.

I also spent some time in February laying out a timeline, worst case scenario, probable scenario and our best case scenario. It looks like we should be debt free at the end of 2020 or beginning of 2021. We are super excited for the chapter after that. At this point in time we are discussing where we would like to move when we have everything paid off. The house we are in currently is small and we know we want somewhere with land.

So for the month of February our numbers are as follows:

Total sent to Mortgage: $2,171.58

Total sent to Baby Step 2: $1,958.38

Total sent to finish Baby Step 1: $622.80

Total amount Baby Step 2 reduced: $1,197.83