I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Tell All Tuesday ~ Commiting to Debt Reduction

Welcome to my weekly update of what’s been going on with our finances and what we’ve paid to debt this week, as well as what decisions we’ve been making as far as debt reduction, savings, and life in general as it relates to money! Some weeks are more exciting than others, and I think this one qualifies as a pretty exciting week. Which is usually true when it’s the week I pay bills.

After a lot of thought about what our priorities are for the future, and also factoring in the logistics of everything, we made the decision not to go to World Championships this year. This isn’t completely because of our debt, although it is a factor, but also because the competition this year is in the middle of the week vs the end of the week as it has been in years past. My spouse would have to take more time off from work and his vacation days are stretched thin as it is with having to take time off for my varied medical tests. And, logistically, I would be driving 12 hours in the car a day after I had a colonoscopy instead of three days after. Which seems a recipe for disaster in and of itself. I could reschedule the procedure, but it would be several months from now and I really would like to make sure nothing is seriously amiss in my colon sooner rather than later. So, basically, the stars are not aligned for it to happen this year.

And, honestly, I feel good about the decision. Yes, I want to be world champion, and yes, I want to just compete even if I don’t win. But I realized that even if I am never in the top ten again and I never have this chance again, I won’t regret the decision to not go this year, because it feels like the right choice for my entire family, not just me. And it feels like the right choice for me too. It wasn’t an easy decision, and I actually used a few list-making pros and cons programs to help me think more clearly about it (more on that later this week).

So, with that decision made, I took the snowflaking money I had been sitting on this past month, as well as the blog and taekwondo income that had come in this month, and put it towards my spouse’s student loan. It ended up being $883.31 on top of the regular payment we make of $437.59 each month, for a total of $1320.90 towards the student loan this month. I also made the minimum payments to our other two debts:

Current total as of 06/17/08: $20,050.32 (original $36,451.71)

Principal paid to date $16,401.39

Broken down into:

• Student loan (at 7%): $11,328.05 (paid min $144.50)

• Spouse student loan (at 9%): $6682.48 (paid $1320.90)

• Car loan (at 4%): $2039.79 (paid min $228.32)

NCN Network Chart: Paid 45% total since start of blog (last month 40%)

If we can pay off another 5% next month, we would hit the 50% mark just 13 months after I started this blog, which would be amazing. But I am not confident that we’ll have that much in income to pay. We also are hovering right on the edge of having paid our debt down to less than $20,000 - and will definitely hit that milestone next month. Hurrah! I had put $728 into our savings account (the matching $883.31 from our snowflakes minus the wisdom tooth copay), because we are still splitting our snowflakes 50:50 between debt and savings until our savings account is at $2000. And then yesterday, because every time I decide to make a large student loan payment, it seems something happens, we had to make an unexpected car repair that ended up being about $350. This came back out of our savings account, which now is still hovering around $1400 instead of approaching $2000. So we will still be splitting the snowflakes 50:50 and since tutoring is slowing down, part of the taekwondo income next month will probably be diverted into our budget versus saved for snowflakes. And there is the possible electrical panel upgrade (which has been behaving so far but we’ll see). I do have high hopes that we may get to 50% paid off by the end of summer.

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