I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Tell All Thursday ~ Flu Edition

Well, this week has been nothing like I originally had planned. My son brought how the flu from preschool, and it was a houseguest I was NOT happy to see. His illness started Thursday, and by Saturday I was miserably sick as well, and my spouse joined the party Sunday. My daughter just started her run with the flu Tuesday, so we’re not over it yet, but my son and spouse are both well and back to their normal routines. I was unlucky enough to develop a secondary bacterial infection besides, so a trip to urgent care and some antibiotics later, and I am finally beginning to feel better. Not good, but better. I have a weekend of resting as much as possible planned and hopefully by the end of it, my entire family will be well again.

This week showed me how nice it is to generally have your finances in order so that you can largely ignore them for a week with no ill affects. I did have to log into online banking and pay two bills, and write a check for the mortgage, but otherwise, I haven’t done anything. But since I knew about how much money we had before I got ill, and what should be paid, the rest could just wait without me worrying about things bouncing or other problems. I am very grateful for that, because there were a few days where I couldn’t be upright for more than a few minutes without feeling like I was going to collapse.

I hate the flu. Honestly, I hate it. But anyway.

So the net result of this is that the only change in the debt picture this past week is that we paid our car payment. This weekend I need to sort out a number of things and see if we can make a extra student loan payment, or if I just need to move the money into the ING student loan payoff subaccount. I have had about $250 come in in the past week or so from surveys I’d taken, survey referrals, and some other miscellaneous blog-related income, and as soon as I go to the bank to deposit the checks I will determine where to send that money dependent on what else we have to snowflake at that point. We also received our tax refund, and originally I was thinking it could go towards the student loan but in my flu-addled delirium I forgot that we have to bring our emergency fund back up to $1000 from the $450 it is at right now. I should be able to do that but not much else with that money.

So our current numbers:

• Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71
• Current total as of 02/28/08: $26,094.08
• Principal paid to date $10,140.65
• Broken down into:
  • Credit Card: PAID OFF 2/7/08
  • Student loan: $11,636.71
  • Spouse student loan: $11,537.66
  • Car loan: $2919.71 (paid minimum payment of $228.32)
• Current % of debt paid off according to NCN Network Chart: 28.42% (last week 27.82%)

The car loan, our smallest current debt, has dropped below the $3000 mark so that is very exciting! Its interest rate is only 4% (versus the 9% on spouse’s student loan) which is why we are attacking the student loan next. I’m going to work out some goals for the student loan payoff very soon and start really focusing on how we can get that done with the same intensity as we did the credit card. I want that balance to drop into 4-figure land, and soon!

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