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Love this thread. Great seeing all these goons getting control of their finances and money. In our own incremental improvement, the GF and I have combined our finances and started to do monthly budgets. Neither of us have really budgeted before and having combined our incomes we're suddenly communicating a whole lot more about money as well. We also discovered that we have almost $1000 a month between our incomes that wasn't earmarked for anything that kept getting siphoned away on little things here and there. Additionally we paid off our last consumer credit loan leaving just the mortgage at $110k and about $70k in student loans between us. We had already allocated about $1700 a month to our debt snowball so if there really is $1000 left over at the end of the month we can really start kicking the hell out of those student loans. For anyone that's interested, we're using Mint to track our spending, this excel spreadsheet for calculating and projecting our debt snowball and a slightly modified version of this family budget template from Microsoft to get all this under control. It's amazing how good it feels to start seeing balance statements on loans approach and reach $0 while watching the amount of money left over at the end of the month continue to increase.
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Jan 4, 2013 14:52
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 18:23 |
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Hooooly poo poo. we've done it. We ran through the debt snowball. This morning I sent off my last payment on my last loan. After starting this back in May of 2012 we have paid off almost $20,000 in debt including credit cards, my fiancee's car, student loans and a new air conditioner. The most daunting was definitely the student loans. When we started this we were looking at $13,500 in student loan debt. After this morning we're looking at $0. Now it's on to Step 3, 6 months of savings aka "There is how much in our savings account?!?" We'll also be saving for a wedding in 2015 that we will simply write a $7,000 check for. During the first 3 steps we've had multiple dog emergencies, car breakdowns, household emergencies and even some small but incredibly fun vacations. I never thought we'd actually reach this point when we started but now that we're here this is an amazing feeling.
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Jan 11, 2014 14:17
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OneWhoKnows posted:Woohoo, one less monthly payment. Sweet! Was that your biggest debt or close to it? Are you debt free/about debt free now?
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Apr 8, 2014 14:07
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Bumping this old thread to announce that for the first time ever we have broken the $10,000 in the bank mark! Granted, $5k of that is earmarked for our wedding and we'll drop below $10,000 once some bills get paid but this is the first time I've ever seen that much money sitting in our accounts. 
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May 1, 2014 20:27
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So a weird improvement I guess. My new wife and I went to the bank today to get all of our accounts combined, get her on my CC account, etc. Turns out I've somehow managed to get a 812 credit score. Was a bit of a surprise since I only thought it went up to 800 but it let them drop my CC rate by 2% which is always a good thing.
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Jul 3, 2015 23:40
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It's amazing how good "I'm worth nothing!" feels when, financially, you've been worth less than that for so long. It's a grind to be sure but keep up the good work. It really is worth it.
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Nov 21, 2015 02:59
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 18:23 |
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It's been a stressful time but I managed to make a lateral move at work that gets me home everynight with my 10 month old. As part of the move we sold our house in Utah and with the proceeds paid off our only car loan ($15k), a private loan we used to purchase a second rental property ($21k), moved to a cheaper cost of living area and still had enough left over to get some items of interest for the new house. Now we just need to attack the credit card debt with the money we're saving from the other paid off loans and we should be sitting awfully pretty.
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Jul 25, 2017 14:27
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