When I started this spreadsheet in January the minimums added up to $3920 (If I went back to November it would’ve been worse, but I don’t have complete records of that). Last month the minimums added up to $3177. That’s a difference of $743 per month. When I was trying to pay $3920, I was coming up short and having to go further in debt to pay for other needs like food and gas. There was also a lot of borrowing from one account to pay another. Needless to say there wasn’t anything extra to pay down the debts. That $743 dollar difference makes it a lot easier to pay cash for everything and apply extra payments toward debt.
It’s been two months since my last revision of the debt snowball and I’ve decided to update it.
Here is a spreadsheet showing the current status:
When you add all my minimum payments they add up to $984. I have made it my new goal to pay $1000 per month toward debts (other than the Auto Loan) [...]
I clicked over to Blogging Away Debt and read that there is a free download of Jean Chatzky’s Book titled, The Difference. It’s only for a limited time Friday and Saturday on the Oprah.Com website.
On Blogging Away Debt, Tricia writes that what she has read about the book reminds her of the book The [...]
It’s March 12th and, other than my wife’s cell phone bill, all our bills for March have been paid. I get paid tomorrow and there isn’t anything that *MUST* be paid in the next week. It’s been a long time since I could say that!
I’ve already submitted a payment for the first bill due in [...]
Something I have never mentioned on this blog that I might as well write about is the $25000 loan I took out of my 401k almost two years ago.
I consider it one of my dumbest moves ever! Maybe I did need the money at the time, but it didn’t do me any good, because:
I can’t [...]
I started another spreadsheet to track my electricity usage. My electric company had the last three years worth of bills on their web site, so I was able to compile a lot of past data to compare our current (no pun intended) usage against. I just recently installed a programmable thermostat and my February bill [...]
