Thanks for visiting Ultimate Money Blog! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]