The last time I updated this, I owed $12,333.78 on the student loan. As of today, the current balance owed is $11,899.22! I am happy that it has fallen below the $12,000 mark!

I got paid a quarterly bonus and put most of it towards the student loan. Also, I have paid off the Home Depot Credit Card that had 0% for 12 months before the promotional period expired.

Ultimately, I’d like to pay off this student loan before the year is over, but that seems like a pretty hefty goal, so I’m going to go with 2 years, or 24 months to have it paid off.

At the beginning of the year, I posted our 2010 Financial goals. I figured I’ll do a 6 month check up because that’s better than waiting until say, September, and realize that we’re failing miserably on our goals. Not cool. Here are the goals we set for ourselves:

Goal #1: Pay off at least $3,500 in principal on our mortgage. To date, we’ve paid off $1028.66. I think we’re a little behind, but much closer than I thought we would be!

Goal #2: Raise my 401k contribution to 10%. Um, I think I’m contributing 6% right now?!  I need to just do this.  All it will take is the click of my mouse.

Goal #3: Pay off our car loan. We are well on our way to paying off this debt!  Only about $1500 left.

Goal #4: Come up with a budget and stick to it.  Uh… yeah… still hasn’t happened.

I wanted to set realistic goals so that they were reasonable.  I think we are doing pretty well so far.

How are your financial goals coming along?  Are you still working on paying off debt, or are you in the saving money phase?

As of this moment, we owe $3,040 on our car loan. Add to that the $1500 I got burned by lending money to a friend, and we are $4,540. in debt.  Honestly?  I’m not stressing too much about it.  I know that we are doing our best to get it paid off.  At this point, though, I’m very tempted to just take the money out of our emergency fund and pay off the car loan.  That would be that.

At the same point, though, $3000. is almost a year’s worth of payments.  I could keep making the $250 car payment.  Life would go on.  I’m thinking that once we get down to $1500 or so, I’ll just take that out of savings and pay it off.

How is your debt reduction progressing?

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?

We are student loan debt free!!  On Friday, I made the final payment online, checked this morning, and it had posted.  I can’t tell you how excited I am to be rid of this debt!  We have paid off this last loan of $12,333.80  in 1 year, 3 months, and 25 days.  Yes!

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it on the blog before, but this $12,333.80 is not the only student loan debt we had.  In 2004, Mr. Money enrolled in culinary arts school and we moved across country for him to attend.  Fast forward to October 2006, and now he’s got his degree and has left school with over $36,000 in debt.  Yes, that is not a typo.  $36,000 was more debt than I ever cared to accumulate, and we went full force attacking it.

We paid off  almost $24,000 in two years, on mainly my salary of $12 an hour full time, plus Mr. Money’s salary of $8(?) an hour part time.  Needless to say, we lived pretty poor to be able to pay off that kind of money in that short of a period of time.  In 2007, we bought a house and added more debt to the plate.  At the start of this blog, we had $12,333.80 left. I knew I wanted to pay this off as quickly as possible. One of my 2009 financial goals was to pay off this student loan and I thought it was a hefty goal. Here we are, halfway through the year and we’ve done it.  It is quite an amazing feeling!

It doesn’t feel real that we’ve paid of $36,000 worth of debt (just in student loans!) in 2 and a half years.  Looking at how much money we made doesn’t even make it seem possible but we did it all while saving for an emergency fund, putting a nice down payment on a car, and paying extra on our other loans.  The fact is, we did it, and I can’t imagine a greater feeling.

Now onto chipping away at our car loan and living a debt free life soon!

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated on our car loan and student loan balances.  As you can see by the nifty tracker on the right side of my blog, as of today we’ve paid off 67% of our student loan and 44.8% of our car loan.  Add those together, and it looks like we’ve paid off 111.8% of our debt.  Too bad we’re not over 100% on one of those!  I can’t wait until that day!!

Remember when I thought I was going to lose my job? The company says they are not going to lay off anyone in the branches from the branch manager level down, so I’m feeling semi comfortable as far as my job goes.  I’ve come to the realization that I’ve got a pretty good emergency fund set up, so any extra funds can go towards these two debts.

I’m shooting towards paying off the student loan by the end of the year.  I think that’s definitely doable.  How is your debt payoff coming along?  

The last time I updated about our debt reduction, we owed more than 50% on our student loans. I am happy to say that today we hit over 50% paid! I am ecstatic! I thought it would take us a lot longer than this to knock out some debt.  I had originally planned on paying off the student loan in the next nine months, but then decided that I would do a “reverse debt snowball” instead, and put the money that I was going to throw at the student loan in a savings account earning 4% interest. It looks like that was a sound decision, because now there’s rumors that they will start converting my area first. Oh well. I’ve got an emergency fund, and that’s what it for: in case we need it.

I can’t wait until I get to 50% of our car loan, but that should only take us 5 months or so.  I’ll keep chiseling away at these debts and try my darnedest to save, save, save!

In the summer of 2004, Mr. Money and I were living in Colorado, working on a ranch breeding miniature horses. We were having the time of our lives living in the wilderness, but I couldn’t help but get these nagging feelings that we weren’t on a good financial path. We weren’t saving for retirement, we didn’t have health insurance, we were unable to buy a house, and I knew that this wasn’t something we could do for the rest of our lives. Not to mention, we were contract labor, which ultimately meant we were responsible for our own taxes.

We decided we wanted to do something with our lives that would provide stability, so our decision was for Mr. Money to return to college to complete a degree. He chose culinary arts, so we researched a few schools and decided that it would be better to move across the country to go to school and live for a couple years. Not only was the school a little cheaper, but the cost of living was a lot less, and we were much closer to my family (a 5.5 hour drive versus 24 hours). In hindsight, I would have stayed in Colorado because of how homesick we always are, but that’s the beauty of looking back.

Going back to school meant we had to take out student loans, and over the course of two years, we found ourselves over $36,000 in debt. The thought of paying back that much money made me sick to my stomach. I was confident that Mr. Money’s career would make it worth it, and I had been promoted to office manager of a bank in March of 2007, so I wasn’t as worried about it. Mr. Money found a job in the culinary field at an upscale restaurant, but it was an hourly wage, and sometimes less than 40 hours a week. After getting promoted and longing for stability, I decided we should settle down here and buy our first house. Our rent had increased to $700 a month and that was the last straw.

Working in the financial industry, I figured that our debt to income probably wouldn’t be in line for the amount we wanted to be preapproved for, so I took money out of savings to pay off two student loans so that we’d be better candidates. As of today, we’ve paid off approximately $30,000 in student loans, leaving $6,850 left. I can’t wait until we are rid of that debt.

As of today, we’ve got our first mortgage debt, second mortgage debt (we did an 80/15/5 when we bought the house), the car loan, and student loan. We are contributing to my 401k and saving money each month. I think we’re in a pretty stable financial situation, and I’m really proud of what we have and how we got here.

We’ll keep paying off debt and living below our means and see where that gets us. I’m excited to see where we’re at in 5 years!

Do you have a financial story? I’d love to read it!

The last time I updated, which was July 23, we owed $8,800.00 on our student loans. As of today, we only owe $7250! I can’t wait to get this loan paid off! I plan on getting it paid off by the end of the year next year. If we can get it paid off sooner, spectacular! Then it’s on to the car loan.  Whew.  All of our extra money is going to go towards paying off debt because I feel we have a pretty padded emergency fund currently.

No spending month has taught me a few invaluable things. 

• We can live on a lot less than we thought we could.  We weren’t horrible about spending money frivolously, but there was definitely room to tighten the belts.
• There are many activities I can do to keep myself busy and not spend money.  Honestly, I feel better when I do those things!  I think of all the money I’m saving and putting towards debt.
• I’ve learned that I like cooking.  Before, we’d go out to eat or Mr. Money would cook.  Now, I’m doing more cooking and baking and I really enjoy it!

I can’t wait until my tracker says 50%! Let’s hope by the end of the year!

What is your priority “debt snowball”?