June 27, 2008
Getting Tired
Normally I’m a very patient person and don’t mind waiting for good things to happen. We have some credit card debt on each of us which has gone way down this year, but the momentum was short lived. While I am currently in a payment plan on my student loans, my wife has her loans in a grace or forbearance. At least we are not paying off a car on top of it all. The mortgage is still there and it would be great to pay it down, but everything has to happen in a particular order.
I’ve made several snowball type of spreadsheets to determine what I would need to pay on each card to get rid of it by a certain time. Sadly this payment process is over a 2 year span and it’s frustrating that it will take that long to get rid of credit cards. We’re not using them but it doesn’t feel like we’re paying them down and off quickly enough because each has a balance in the 4 figure range. I considered some of those 0% transfer cards but the savings on the interest is very minimal to surf balances all the time. When a challenging month comes up where there are increased expenses, we can’t make the payment on the spreadsheet. This just makes the plan stretch out longer and that just makes the debt even more depressing.
We have got to get these credit cards gone in order to tackle the crap out of the student loans. My wife is getting these statements from her student loans and it shows how much was borrowed, how much interest will be paid over the payment time frame, and the grand total of the two. In most cases the number is more than double what was originally borrowed. She has a 283 month payment plan which is 23 years and 7 months if we just keep paying what they ask for every month. My loans are on a 120 month or 10 year plan, which is also a long time to pay off a loan. It seems to me the larger the loan the longer you can pay on it to keep making them more money. When the credit cards are paid off, I plan to double the payments on all the loans to at least cut the time down to less than half, and pile up on the weaker smaller balances. The frustration right now is the credit cards are not paid and we’re not even making payments to her loans. The interest on her loans is only going up every month we have to drag this out, and I don’t make enough money to make payments on them. All of our debt is too much for me to completely service on my income alone.
On a positive note my house value is starting to finally come back up from the bottom. It is almost to a break even point where it is worth what I owe. In a few more months it may even start to be worth more than what I owe and my equity in it can actually increase. The market is still soft but there are houses in the community that are starting to sell. If my wife gets a job that requires us to relocate, I think we might be able to sell for enough to clear what we owe on it. Paying the realtors and other fees is another story.
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