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 [...]