Today I received a letter from a credit card company informing me that my Annual Percentage Rate would increase from 16.24% to 27.99% unless I reject the increase. By rejecting the increase, I will be unable to use this card anymore. If I do use the card again, the rate increase will go into effect then.
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) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I started filing my taxes online in the year 2000 and have used the Turbotax web site every year to submit them. Their service worked very well, so when I started receiving my tax-related paperwork (W2 forms, 1098 forms), I went to the TurboTax site and started entering the information.
Because I had refinanced my home [...]
