Friday, November 9, 2007

Mental Victory & a Milestone

Whoa, what a week!! I was in a work training session all week and between the extra hours and trying to make up the real work I'm supposed to do, I have neglected my housework, sleep, and of course, the blog. :( I unfortunately didn't have the foresight to prepare some posts soooo... nothing all week long.

At the beginning of this week, we paid off another credit card! (With a little help from all the paychecks.) But it's a shallow victory. We paid a lot of the card off with a balance transfer - $5100 to be exact. So the $1900 payment I made on Monday didn't really pay it off. But oh man, does it feel good.

I have all my debts listed in an excel spreadsheet, from highest interest rate to lowest. Every time I pay something off, I highlight the entire line in red. It's such a powerful feeling to eliminate a debt and put that big fat red line on the "Debt Snowball" spreadsheet. Before paying off our largest debt last month, I hadn't crossed out a line since February. February! No wonder I was losing motivation.

I am psyched to be gaining momentum again and to finally be back on track. In addition, this last payment has gained us another milestone - we are now under $15,000 in credit card debt. (Current total is $14,616.42. We started this journey at $38,621.13. This means that we have paid off 62% of our debt! We're almost 2/3 of the way there!! :-D Just when we needed some more incentive to stick with it. Now I understand more why Dave Ramsey recommends paying off the smallest debts first - the feeling of accomplishment is tremendous.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

COngratulations, that's great news. It feels fantastic, doesn't it? Since our current debt that we are paying off is just under $12,000, it will be a while till we enjoy that feeling again.