Step Away From the Panic Button!!

Did you hear it? Did you hear the celebration when we made our final payment to another student loan this morning? If you've been following our blog this last year, you know this is very exciting news! We started 2012 with 3 final debts, all three of those debts were student loans. We paid off the first of those 3 loans in April 2012.

Our attack strategy is called the Debt Snowball. Here's the jist...we make minimum payments on all of our debts except the smallest balance. The debt with the smallest balance gets all of the extra money we can scrape up and we pile it on until it's paid off! (Need extra money? Check out how to make a zero-based budget) Then you take all the extra money and minimum payment from the smallest debt (which is gone now!!) and put it on the next smallest balance and BAM you've got a debt snowball! So in May 2012 we did just that and started chipping away at the next student loan balance and paid it off today. ONE MORE LOAN LEFT!!!

Because we were getting so close to our goal, naturally, something had to go wrong! So far this month, we have had some "planned emergencies" and found out we needed to set enough money aside to get the fuel injectors replaced in one of our cars and save money for Chris to get some dental work done. Next, I guess we needed a "spontaneous emergency," our same sick car needed a new battery today. So glad we don't have the debt we did four years ago or we wouldn't have the ability to put as much money into life happening than we were able to this week. Sorry no panic button today!

2013 Debt Pay-Off: 1,606.49

Total Debt Pay-Off: 39,606.49 <--- even closer to $40,000!! :)