Since it has been a while since I updated the ‘ol debt snapshot and totals, I thought having paid off the pickup would be a good a time as any to update things. So this is the year end as it stands.
So close to being 1/2 way to debt free. Already we are feeling so much less stressed about finances just having paid of what we have already. When we started 2008 we were still pretty wasteful even though we had paid some things off. Now things are much different.
So ’nuff said, here is the state of things now:
The pic is kind of icky looking, but if you click on it, it will open up normally. Basically we are at 48% paid off. All that remains now are the really big student loans, the mortgage and one medical bill to he hospital.
You will notice that now the house will be our next target, although we are waiting to see how this years income taxes come out before allocating the new budget and continuing on the debt snowball. This will probably be a slow target but since it’s our highest APR of what’s left, it deserves to die next. Now we own both vehicles, maybe some day we can also own our house.
Wow that is amazing that you paid off that much in a year. How did you do it?
Well it took several years to get this far. For many years we have been paying the minimum on everything plus an extra 10 or 20 dollars. We used the debt snowball method paying off one at a time with whatever extra we could, then when one bill was paid we put the 20 extra plus the other minumum towards debt 2 and so on. Now after paying off all these debts we have about $850 extra to put towards debt. It took a long time of paying 20 dollars extra, but eventually it pays off, then it’s like an avalanche and you really gain momentum.