Well, it’s been a while since I have had time to really sit down and muddle through the books and log onto all the websites to get our balances. It’s kinda sad that we can’t really make huge one grand payments extra here and there since the wife is a stay at home mom these days. In fact, we are running our checking acct so close that it bounces down to around $6 left in January… I guess I need to start doing more surveys again, LOL. Anyway, the good news is that the primary focus of our debt snowball and snowflake efforts (the truck loan) is really showing signs of improvement still. Hopefully we can have it paid off in early spring. It’s at $3800 left now and in 2 weeks when the next auto draft hits it will be down to $3000! Wow, the end is in sight!!!!
That will put us into the next phase of our snowball which is the house. I logged into countrywide and found that my estimate of the balance was off, so I updated my charts. I also found that we are at 84.2% remaining, which means when that 4.2% of the loan is paid we will be at 80% and can take that stupid PMI off. That will save us another 15 bucks every month.
nolaffing says
Try to think of your wife as a stay at home mom as an investment in your future 🙂 Your child’s good health, happiness and safety is more important than any debt repayment. Plus your child is not being raised by strangers for 8 hours of the day.
Anonymous says
I have to question, $36K for a mortgage? I’ve purchased some small fixer uppers over the last 10 years but even my lowest mortgage was $77K…
madsow says
Yup, that’s not a typo.
We used to live in DFW and you could not get a decent house in a decent neighborhood for less than 100k and even then you probably had to do some fixing up.
But here in rural Kansas you can get an 1100 square foot house, 3BR/1BA/1car garage in a decent neighborhood in a small town. We have a brand new(2008) set of schools and are about to get a new public rec/swimming pool. Our 1100 square foot beauty was about a typical 40k purchase price (we put 10% down, lol). We looked at a couple big houses that were about 70k and for that money you can get a 2 story 4 bedroom 2300 square foot house.
The real dumps around here are 10-20k, for 40k-50k here you can get a really nice starter home.
The only downside is the 2 hour drive to a big city.
I laugh at the home shows “flipping” houses, because in kansas, if you sink much into fixing up a house, you will never get it back. I guess that’s just for big cities.LOL.
Susan says
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
http://www.car-insurance-choices.com