Well, If I were to do a mini check up on where I am in my New Year goals I would have to say no bad.
I’m not exactly on track with everything but I’m chuggin’ along and am actually doing better this year than in years past.
MONEY
I’m excited to say that, so far, all bills have been paid on time. I even paid my January mortgage in January! How crazy is that?
Right now I’m using my Open Office spreadsheet. I copied the Gazelleintense excel spreadsheet and it’s working great. I give every dollar a name and keep track of where my money is going almost daily. Now I know that is a little extreme but I know if I don’t stay on top of it things will go downhill fast.
We have begun Dave Ramsey’s baby steps again. We are doing step one and two at the same time. The reason is that my husband has a little taken out of his paycheck every month that goes in to a separate savings account. This is going to be our Emergency fund. We never see the money so we don’t miss it. So while that’s working in the background we can actively work on the second step – The Debt Snowball!
At the beginning of January we started with $37,875.22 in Debt. This does not include the house since that is a whole baby step in itself.
The $37K includes some credit cards, medical bills, a gas card, a student loan (not mine, long story), and the car.
The credit cards have been turned over to collections (except one) so they no longer collect interest, the medical bills do not have interest and the car is less than 2% interest so, except for the one credit card and the student loan, I do not have to worry about the interest rates. The one credit card, Discover, is at a very high interest rate so the sooner I get it paid the better.
The next thing I need to do is set up my payment schedule. I went to FinancialMentor.com and input all my debt info and got a website payoff schedule. If I only pay what I entered I will have my entire debt paid off in 41 months. That is a long time and I do plan to pay it off sooner but that is what it will take at minimum payments.
This may seem daunting to a lot of people but it is exciting to me! I’m looking forward to the day I can scream very loudly – I’M DEBT FREE!!!! It will happen.
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