Here are a couple updates from me, Debt Dummy!
Update 1:
In case you missed it last time I shared, I am excited to announce that I will be featured in Canadian Budget Binder’s Making a Difference series as part of their Saturday Weekend Review, on July 22! This will share a little bit about who I am and what I blog about. I am very excited to be featured and I look forward to sharing my message with some new readers!
Update 2:
I am very excited to say that I am still on track to finish paying off my first chunk of my debt (a credit card) by the day before my birthday, which is exactly 3 bi-weekly pay cycles away. Hooray!
I am SO excited to say goodbye to those monthly payments and to the interest that this card has been sucking out of my bank account for far too long! Last night, I was working in the spreadsheet that I plan my budgeting with when I realized that I would get to stop allocating the 350$+ per paycheck that I now dedicate to that dumb credit card. I know this was obvious conceptually, but the practical realization that I would actually get to do it, and soon was beyond exciting. After the date in my spreadsheet on which I finish paying it off, I merged all the cells and wrote something along the lines of “DUNZO MUTHAF*%$AAAAA!!!!!!!!!!”, and….yeah, it was extremely exciting. This past week, I was fortunate enough to borrow and read the book Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey from a girlfriend, and in it, he stresses the importance of having an emergency fund before you start paying off your credit cards. Well, I didn’t read this book until this past week, so I have started out in a semi-backwards order, but this struck me as a good idea. Therefore, once I am done paying off this first credit card (after this success experience, because success experiences are important for maintaining motivation), I have decided to put all of the extra money I would have been paying toward the next credit card (about 350$ per bi-weekly paycheck after my student loans and student line of credit payments, etc.) toward creating a 1000$ emergency fund before I switch over to paying down the next card. I think that this is a very good idea because one roadblock I hit last year when trying to pay off my cards was that I needed new winter tires for my car, and I ended up having to put the cost on my credit card because I didn’t have a buffer. That was a really painful setback. It felt really demoralizing, and it had a negative effect on my motivation for a while. I really don’t want to have to suffer something like that again, so I have decided to start following Dave’s recommendation of always having at least a 1000$ emergency fund. After that, I am excited to start paying down the second (and final) credit card, before moving on to the student loans. In case you are wondering, I am paying my debts off in order of highest to lowest interest rate. The credit cards have the highest interest rate of any of my debts, and they both have the same rate, so I chose the smaller one first, to create a realistic and attainable goal that would be likely to create a success experience for me. After that, I will tackle the next credit card, and then the rest (student line of credit, and student loan) in the order of descending interest rate. One of the very first things I ever did when I started planning to pay down my debt was that I created a table titled: The Debt Table of Doom (uplifting, right?) where I plotted the interest rates and monthly payments of all of my loans at the time. This helped me to form my plan of attack.
Well, those are my updates for now, so I wish you all a wonderful weekend, & if you happen to be in Canada, have a very happy Canada Day!!!
Thank you for reading,
Debt Dummy
