My Debt Blog

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.

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This is probably the worst update I have posted thus far while I pretend to get out of debt. Christmas is just too difficult to manage and my income couldn’t keep up with our regular household expenses. What pisses me off the most is I feel like I have no control over the finances because I’m the only one who cares. More money isn’t going to solve anything, it’s just an illusion to be able to spend more. Here’s the breakdown of the damage:

I’m pretty sure I knew this would happen in the middle of December. My wife had to have this expensive purse and all this other crap, paying bills isn’t fun and gets forgotten. She got a rude awakening one morning that her store credit card hadn’t been paid. It isn’t my fault she signed up for the card, bought so much stuff that it is now maxed out, and then doesn’t pay it on top of that. My debt reduction was cut in half due to Christmas on credit and the EF is blown away since she has no income. My wife must find a job so we can get the mess cleaned up. She’s more concerned about her outfit for a social event we’re going to Friday. At some point things need to be paid for before buying more things. I’m extremely frustrated and burned out trying to manage the finances. What a way to start the new year.

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My excitement is bittersweet regarding paying off over $3000 worth of credit card debt so far. I know I should be excited but there’s so much going on next month between car insurance and Christmas, cash flow is going to be rough. We could run to the EF to get us through the month but then it will have to be put back come 2008. I hate having balances on my credit cards and it’s so tempting to use it to pay one off. Then I come back to reality and go back to my 0% balance transfer plan. Here is where I stand for this month:

I will be transferring my Associates and Zales balances to my new card which will allow me 0% APR on balance transfers and no fees. This seems to take time, so I hope they go through next month and I won’t have to worry about paying those two accounts and just the one new one. This will bring me down to three accounts with balances. My focus is to pay over $100 a month to the 0% card so that it will be paid off by this time next year. I need to get my wife on track with her stuff too because I feel her spending using credit cards is offsetting every effort I make to get out of this mess. At least we’re not both heading in the wrong direction.

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Not a whole lot of excitement here. I don’t feel like I’m doing much to actually pay down my debt. The focus is to transfer at least one if not both of my smaller balances to my 0% card for 12 months and then get the principle paid down quickly. The plan is to just lump the payments all together and pay it consistently every month for 12 months. If everything goes as planned those smaller debts will be gone in a year if not quicker. I got to get the small stuff out of the way so I can put more energy into the larger ones. It will be nice to be working on getting BoA out of my life forever. Here’s my progress this month:

I know it’s not very exciting. At least we gain an hour this coming Sunday and I like the cooler months of the year. The car insurance bill will soon be on its way, and then of course dealing with the cost of Christmas. For now I am going to hold off on disclosing what I’m getting my wife. I really don’t need any extra attention or comments on that. We’ll see where things stand with the balance transfer this coming month.

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I have been too busy to blog about the on goings of how my financial world is being rocked. After draining the EF and just trying to stay on track, I’m finally back on top of things. The Cubs lost and holy DOW I got some earnings from that thing being all over the 14k mark. Look at my EF over there on the right you’ll see it is back to a healthy 1k. It has been a busy time as we are heading into the holidays which are always expensive. I have yet to zero out the new card that I signed up for before I do the balance transfers at 0%. That will happen this month but I cannot guarantee the balances on the other accounts will happen quickly. At any rate here’s the progress:

My wife returned some of the stuff she bought with that store credit card and we need to get that paid off and closed. I think I communicated my point of view on that whole situation to her, and I believe she understands. We’re currently in a holding steady phase right now which doesn’t make the situation better, but hopefully not making it worse. I have been using Mint.com on top of my spreadsheet to actually track our spending patterns so expect an update on that here soon. Right now it looks like eating out is where our money is going.

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Things are going down but nowhere as quickly as I would like it to. I’m at least where I was before June and all those events happened. Instead of trying to pay off debt I am trying to avoid increasing it. On the other hand my wife isn’t helping us opening a store credit card and buying a bunch of clothes with it. Debt reduction seems counter productive when this happens. Here’s where I currently stand:

I’m glad I got the Zales account down to the 1k because that means it will fall below that next month. If I could figure out a way to budget four focused payments of $250 I could kill that by the end of the year. I also opened a new credit card myself that offers 0% APR for 12 months and $100 gift card with initial purchase. So when I get the card I’ll have to wait before doing the balance transfer to it and buy gas or something with it, pay it off, collect my gift card, and then transfer a balance to it. It will be nice to not pay interest and focus every dollar on principle. Just have to figure out what to do about this store card my wife opened now.

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Like I said in my last update, the balance on my Citi card is ugly. Even with a bigger payment, and it wasn’t much more than the minimum as I’m focusing on my smaller debts, it did not level out a whole lot. I’m struggling here trying to recover from an ugly June with more expenses than I really needed to deal with. Even with spinning and rationalizing what is going on, it will not continue to go up! Here are the details on the damage I have done to these things this past month:

I’ve decided in an attempt to try to not only motivate myself to pay it off, but force myself to pay it off within 12 months, to get a 0% balance transfer offer (with no fees!) and move the Associates balance to it. I’ll divide out the balance into fixed payments and treat it as though it were a term instead of revolving account. The Zales account will drop to $1k this month, and I would love to make a mad attempt to pay this one off this year. This would mean about 4 payments of $250 each to kill it once and for all so I’ll see if this can be done.

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