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?

In a perfect world we would all have enough money to buy whatever we wanted. Need a new car? Buy it! Need a new house? Buy it! Need a new computer? Buy it! Need a new refrigerator? Buy it! If only life was that simple. Unfortunately, sometimes credit cards make life seem that simple. But like the old commercial used to say, “you can pay me now or pay me later!” And if you’re not careful, next thing you now later comes along, and you have a pile of debt to deal with. If that sounds like you, then it’s time to make some changes. Here is a simple 3-step debt reduction plan that anyone can follow. It may sound a little basic, but getting out of debt IS pretty basic. Not necessarily easy, but the concept is basic, if you do it correctly. So here are instructions for creating your own debt reduction plan in 3 easy steps: 1) What is your goal? Like you would do for any worthwhile goal, if you want to get out of debt [...]

photo credit: kainr Well, we did it! I bit the bullet and finally made the last payment on our Home Depot Credit Card.  It made no sense to me to keep making payments each month when we had the money to pay it off, so I just did it.  It was a wash anyway! I could have kept the money in our ING savings account, but it seems that is not really a high yield savings account right now anyway. I figured that if I left that money in the savings account for 6 months I’d earn under $1.50. Was the hassle of making the payments each month worth it to me? No. How does it feel to be credit card debt free? Fabulous! To be honest, I feel better than I did when we paid off our student loans. Crazy, right? Next up: the car loan.  And then we’ll be 100% debt free except for our mortgage.  Woo! What are you working on paying off right now, if anything?