Wednesday, January 11, 2012

If I may direct your attention....

To the bottom of the Keeping Tabs on the Benjamins side bar, on the right left side of your screen (you really would think I would know my right from my left by now).  Scroll down to the bottom of it.  See where it says Retirement Loan?  Notice anything?

That is right.  Only $88 left until that bad boy is paid off!!!!!  G-man gets paid on January 23 again, and then it is DONE.

It was a $10,000 loan, originated in February 2008, for 5 years.  We used it to replace the roof and paint the house, along with a few other minor things.  We will have paid it off in 4 years, PLUS, it is a few weeks earlier than anticipated!!!  Yay us!!

I have put $115 aside each paycheck since our Christmas fund was fully funded towards this.  It has been TIGHT, as we also started paying my car loan in December.  But we have managed, and along with the bi-weekly amount of $105 that goes towards it (automatically deducted from G-man's paycheck)....we are down to one last payment.  

We are seriously considering taking out a $35,000 loan from the retirement account and wiping out the credit cards.  The rate has now dropped to 1.50%, and if we do a 3 year loan....we would still be paying almost $150 less per month.  We are leaning toward a 4 year loan, just to give us some breathing room, and pay extra on it as we can...to try and knock it out in 3.5 yrs. (more on this to come)  We have to wait 60 days from the payoff date of the current loan before we can do anything, so this won't happen until late March/early April.

My math must have been off, because I thought we would pay this off in early February.  The $115 that I ear-marked for the retirement loan for those 2 paychecks will be split between the EF and our general savings account.  After that, the $115 will now be directed towards savings for Camp for the kids (which will be fully funded by the end of May).  Once Camp is funded, the $115 will go to the Christmas account, which will be fully funded by November, which will leave us the remainder of the year towards our $500 goal for something for US.

But I am just happy dancing that we managed to pay it off early, and with the car payment!!

The retirement loan was never part of the debt total.  Best that I can tell, at the start of the blog, we owed about $7,000 on it.  If you add that to the original debt number, our "new" number would have been over $83,000.  So in that sense, we have made progress.

You have no idea how that $88 is killing me!  But I need to let the plan just do its thing.  Less than 2 weeks and it is over.

15 comments:

  1. Yay! Yay! Yay!

    A win! I can not wait for the 23rd for you!

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  2. Awesome!!!!! Awesome!!!! Awesome!!!!!! Can't wait to see a big fat ZERO on that!!!!!

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  3. That's so exciting. It must be so hard to not scrape up the 88 dollars and just pay it off. I think it is very smart to stick to your plan. That will be so exciting once you can cross off another loan off of the list!

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  4. I feel your pain, trying to get this fridge paid off. But you are doing so well. You have made progress. Don't just look at the numbers Mysti, look at life experience. Those #'s will go down, I am going to ask Rhitter if she wants to join a team to go rough people up who don't make make enough progress on debt. We could fly in her ship!

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  5. Cool progress there. If you've got that much in the 401K that you can take such hefty loans from it, I'd think about doing so, in order to free you from consumer debt. (or lessen the burden of consumer debt.)

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  6. Congrats to you! That is a great feeling. Borrowing to pay off the credit card debt at such a low rate sounds like a good plan - as long as you can cut those cards up and don't use them! I've been that refi/borrow route to pay off cc's in the past and twice ended up back in the same boat, so now I have no cc's.

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  7. I love that feeling and know how annoying those tiny little numbers are. But you're right, the 23rd will be here before you know it. I'm on an aggressive funding spree myself-- registration is due next month and I just didn't get myself ready on time. Then summer camp is around the corner (can't kid myself on this one) and then Christmas is here again. I need to give myself this sense of urgency because otherwise? Well stuff like 2011 happens.

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  8. Thanks all!

    Those CC will NEVER end up like this again. NEVER. This whole thing has been so stressful. I want to be able to know we have the cash to pay for anything we want. And I just couldn't bear the idea to go back to this.

    There is a SLIGHT chance that we could be out of debt by my 40th birthday (May 2015)!

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  9. Oh that is awesome! Way to start off the new year. :)

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  10. YAAAAYYY What great news!!!!

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  11. Congratulations! That is fantastic news. :-)

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  12. Great! If you decide to take a loan to knock out the credit cards.....make sure they are gone forever so they do not get used again. It sucks to move debt around to wipe out credit cards only to have them sitting there empty and racking them up again. Ask me how I know :)

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  13. You are really making your money work for you Mysti! That $88 would be killing me too but not long to wait now:)

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  14. Congrats!! You are almost there. It will be such a relief in two weeks to know that this debt is gone forever!

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