We have been making a bunch of extra snowflakes towards the truck loan and managed to knock down a bunch of he principal this last month or so. Mostly due to living very cheaply (such as eating beans for meals and sacraficing comfort for the name of saving money for debt), and selling everything I have laying around the house and garage to make some extra money.
We did good, going from 57% of the debt remaining to 55% this month. I know 2% doesn’t sound like much. But that was several extra snowflakes of a thousand dollars or more in the last month or so.
It feels really good to be making this kind of progress. I know early on when we started this endeavor of paying things off it seemed like we tried and tried to make extra payments, but money was so tight we could not afford more than a couple dollars a month. For a while it seemed like we were making no progress at all. Then slowly as we got one item paid off and started putting that money to the next item we gained some momentum.
It wasn’t until I started this blog in search of inspiration and a creative outlet that we have been really able to go he extra mile. Luckily it was about the same time that the snowball was starting to pick up speed.
It’s been a long road thus far with a long way to go. But I sit back and reflect on where we have come from and I have to tell you that even just having 45% of our debt paid off, we feel so much more content with our situation. It is nice to actually have a cushion for things now. It is nice to have the motivation and see that if it all works out we should be debt free in a couple years.
Momma’s last paycheck came in this week since she quit to be a stay at home momma, so things may be a little different now. Either way, I am confident that I will knock this debt out some day.
Stay tuned… hopefully I can post some inspirational frugal posts coming up soon. These days I can’t seem to really ‘make’ extra money, so I ‘make’ money by saving money.
Cheers!
Thanks for showing this. I took your idea and made my own spreadsheet. It may be that Im sleepy but for the life of me I cant figure out how to get the % paid off lined out. Im using Works Spreadsheet.
It’s quite simple actually.
Take my truck loan…
Original balance: 23,000
Balance remaining: 5900
If you take 5900 divided by 23000 you get .2565 (25.65%), which means that there is 25.65% of the original balance remaining. We want to know what percent is paid off. So you take 100%-25.65%= around 74%.
To put it into a forumla:
1-(remaining/original)= %paid off
Hope that makes sense. In excel (similar to works), I just use a forumla in the cell such as:
=sum(1-(C4/B4))
Where C4 is the cell location of the remaining balance and B4 is the location of the original amount. Then anytime you update your balance, it will automatically update your percentages.
Good luck!