It feels like it’s been forever since I’ve updated on our debt payoff.  We still owe $6600 on our car loan.  It feels like a ton of money.  With the last payment I sent, we went over the 50% paid off mark!  I guess in all honesty, it’s not even been a year since we bought the car, so having half paid off is pretty darn good.

If I pay $550 a month, I can have that car paid off in a year.  That would be awesome!  Of course, right now any extra money is going directly into our emergency fund.  I think we have roughly 8 months of expenses saved right now.  I could take money out of the emergency fund and just pay off the car, but then I’d feel like we need more in savings, so I’m just going to keep doing what we’re doing.  We were paying $250 a month, and I bumped it up to $300 after we paid off our student loans. I could have taken that money and thrown it towards the car, but I decided I’d rather save it instead.

I can’t wait for the darn car to be paid off.  If the economy really starts getting better and our job outlooks are good in six months I just may take the money from savings and pay off the car.  Something to look forward to I guess!

If you are a Dave Ramsey fan, I’m sure you have heard of gazelle intensity.  Basically the gist of it is that you do whatever you can to pay off your debt in the least amount of time possible. Sell things you aren’t using, cut your cable, put the nix on going out to eat, and so on. We attacked our student loans with gazelle intensity, and paid it off a lot sooner than we had hoped. Now the only unsecured debt we have remaining is our car loan at 0%, and I’m not in a hurry to pay that off any time soon.

I almost feel like so much time and energy was focused on paying off that student loan that I’m exhausted from it.  I’m tired of pinching pennies and scrounging up extra money and putting any snowflakes towards debt.  I feel like we’ve accomplished a lot in a short period of time, and now I want to take my time paying off this car.

Seeing that it’s at 0%, it’s not like I’m paying tons of interest if I don’t pay it off quickly.  I won’t save any money if I pay it off early, but that’s definitely not saying it wouldn’t be awesome if we could pay that off by the end of next year as well.  That would rock.  However, I think now I’m going to focus more on saving money for whatever.  I think we’ve got a pretty good emergency fund established.  I’m contributing the max match rate to my 401k.  So I think I’m going to work on saving for the chance we may move back home in the future (2 – 5 years).  I’ll call it my hopes and dreams fund.

Even if we never move back to Colorado, I can still take that money and apply it to the principal on our mortgage, use it as a baby fund, or whatever.  It never hurts to have that extra cash.

Do you think I should work on paying off that car loan as soon as possible, or is my plan better?