One Down...Two to Go!

Chris and I celebrated a milestone this past week, we paid off one of our student loans. We have slowly knocked off debt after debt to get us to this point. We have followed the snowball principle and only paid minumum payments to all of our debts except the smallest one on the list. We attack the smallest loan and then roll on to the next one. Because we have lined-up our debts in order of amount, naturally these last two are going to take awhile to finish off, they are our largest amounts. We will be even more happy to pay them off since they have been along for the ride these last few years.

With all of the talk about student loan forgiveness going on right now, it makes me want to take care of my own mess even more, I don't want tax payers to pay for my loans. Chris and I signed paperwork declaring that we understood that the money we use for college we will pay back. It's hard to hear all of the college grads who think because college was expensive they shouldn't have to pay for it. I agree, college is expensive, but I chose to go and now I pay for that choice. I also learned along the way that I hate debt and because I learned that lesson the hard way, I don't plan on getting any more student loans to finish my masters degree. 

Total debt pay-off: $27,847.52
YTD debt pay-off: $3,847.52

There's an App for that!

We opened another envelope this week! Yay for another thousand bucks paid off!! The card inside this envelope told us to go on a well deserved date night! So we decided to head to the plaza and enjoy some KC BBQ and eat dinner at Jack Stack. The weather was so amazing that we ate on the patio...in MARCH!! After dinner we had cheesecake at THE Cheesecake Factory. It was fun to spend some time just the two of us and celebrate our hard work. We are only a few hundred dollars away from paying off our smallest student loan!! Can't wait to only make 2 debt payments a month!

A teacher at school told me about the perfect iphone app for tracking our progress. It's called Debt Payoff (right next to my NCAA app!!). When I got the app it was free, but it's $0.99 now! Sorry! On this app I can see the interest we are saving by paying hundreds off each month rather than just paying minimum payments. Here's some scary info- if we only make minimum payments from this day forward we will be debt-free in 20 years and 6 months and pay $23,000 in interest! Yikes!

Other features: I can make a pay-off plan (lowest balance first is the same thing as our snowball idea), calculate what our payments will be someday when we get a house, and there are pie charts!!! It's nice to see the interest we pay each month go down because we are knocking the principal down so much.

Envelope #4: $935.92 left to pay-off