May 5, 2008
Plastic Pinch for April
This is a few days behind, but better late than never. If you haven’t noticed already, I did a reset on my Debt-O-Meter to show start balances from March on credit card, student loan, and house debts and the change in April. Payoff priority is obviously in that order for obvious reasons and tax purposes too. I’ve updated my NetworthIQ chart too, which took a straight dive downward. So instead of my net worth actually turning positive in April, our combined net worth is in the negative by six figures.
We got a lot accomplished in April though paying off over 6 grand in debt. A combination of using my bonus from work, our income tax return, and just pure focus on getting this stuff done was our motivation. I’m very pleased to say that we went from 12 credit cards to just 5 (originally I thought it was 4) which is huge. As we start to tackle these other cards, it will take larger payments to knock them down faster. I would like to see our credit card debt reduced by at least $500 a month, that would put us at 20k come the beginning of 2009. We have to get rid of our credit cards before we even think about tackling the student loans, so paying them off quickly is important.
I don’t know how big of an impact on debt we’ll have in May due to my car breaking down and having to replace funds in the EF. We’ll get through this and move forward slowly, but at least it isn’t going backwards.
