Finances & Money

Some major financial accomplishments this week

I don’t announce changes to our debt scales (on the right sidebar) unless something big happens. Well today I made some major changes to some numbers.

Stacie’s Student Loan

The biggest change was that I paid $6000 down on Stacie’s student loan. It was a combination of my tuition reimbursement for my own graduate degree reimbursement and our regular debt overpayment budget. That brought the total still owed down to $4,080, down to just 20% of the original amount left!

Since my own student loan is in deferred status as I’m in school (and the government is paying my debt interest on it) and my graduate tuition is on a 0% interest credit card until December, I decided to use that money for other debt. Before you chide me, I do totally understand that “one missed payment will bring all heck down on you”, blah blah blah. Yes, I know and I’m not a total moron. I pay the bill on-time and I monitor for any changes to due dates.

As a note, we do have enough in savings to be able to pay off the rest of the student loan if we wanted, but for now I want to keep that money in the bank for a rainy day. I have my reasons…

Total Non-Home Debt Remaining

Another major accomplishment today was that I got our remaining total non-home debt below $40,000. That was after I had to increase the total by $5k after charging my tuition this semester. Considering we started at $112,890 just 3 years ago, that’s a major deal. That’s about $73,000 paid off in just 3 years

During those years, we also bought and paid off a $19,000 MINI Cooper in about 2 months, bought a house (3 years ago, which is when we committed to paying down debt), kept contributing to our employer 401ks and a roth IRA, and now have a nice cushion of liquid savings. According to my original estimate, we should be paying off the rest of the debt around this time next year (2009), but I think the extra $10,000 out-of-pocket for school tuition will delay that goal by a few months.

Truck Loan

With a payment that went out today, I finally got my truck loan below $20,000. The original loan was about $28k, after a $5k down payment. Although we have 3 vehicles, this is our only loan.

Masters Tuition

Just to make sure I got the total debt below $40k, I paid a little extra to my Discover Business Card, which houses my Spring 2008 tuition at 0% for a year. If you’re wondering, you can also apply for this card, even if you don’t have a business. Just use your SSN as your business ID.

Paying off debt feels good.