Looks like we won’t be hanging around the 70’s much longer. After applying $414.97 worth of monthly savings to my student loan on top of monthly minimum payments on both loans, we’ve reduced our overall debt by over $800 this month. It would be impressive to bring our debt total down to the 60’s by the beginning of next month. This will require some diligent penny pinching on our part, but we’ve proven we can save big when we cut back on grocery and general household spending. To check out the progress of our debt reduction over the past 7 months, visit here. To see how we’re saving money, check out our Operation Debt Reduction spending guidelines.
Whenever the end of the month is near, I start prematurely adding up our potential monthly savings. This is calculated by adding up our total monthly income then subtracting our total monthly expenses. The difference is what I post at the end of each month as our total monthly savings (check out our progress since July 2011 here). Since we are on a mission to pay off our debt aggressively, all of our monthly savings is applied to our lowest debt using a Debt Snowball plan (check out our debt reduction since July 2011 here).
Preliminary tally for our savings this month is not going to knock anyone’s socks off, that’s for sure. Nonetheless, it’s extra money we did not spend. We will share our January savings totals next week. Thanks for reading along!
I’m not gonna lie.
My happiness from paying off the credit card has been subsiding these past few days. I look at our Total Debt and think, “Am I sentenced to life on a spending lockdown?” We still have over $72,000 of student loans that hang over our head. It just feels heavy. I try to remind myself, if we continue to pay off our debt at our current speed, we’ll have it paid off in less than 2 1/2 years. Even so, I wonder if we have the energy to soldier on at our recent pace. On one hand, it’s like, “Wow, we’ve paid over $15,000 in total debt in 6 months!” and on the flipside, it’s like, “Are we kidding ourselves? We still have over 70 grand to go.” It’s a reality bites moment. There are a lot of those during a debt snowball but we keep on truckin’.
New debt totals in! We were able to slice a nice chunk off our credit card debt after applying $2,169.28 from our September savings to our monthly minimum payment. In addition to our student loan payments, we saw our greatest monthly reduction yet - a total of $2,741.42. Finally seeing progress - yay!
About Me
My husband and I, both artists, are seeking financial sanity amidst the financial insanity in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are on a quest to change our spending habits, get out of debt and start saving.
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