28 Feb
The State of Our Union Laid Bare
Several readers have pointed out that I haven’t really laid out what our financial challenge is and I suppose if you are trying to follow our progress that’s not very fair of me.
I’ve had enough questions about our bottom-line to show you our whole hand and let you predict our fate. Here’s the skinny:
|
Description Net income: Mortgage: CC1: CC2: CC3: CC4: CC5: CC6: |
($265,000) $335 $3,043 $4,998 $6,902 $10,952 $18,344 |
Monthly +5,600 2,180 15 75 168 271 220 660 |
| $44,574 | $2,011 |
This obviously isn’t a full budget, but there you have the creditors and income.
Food ($500), utilities ($500), gas, insurance, pre-school tuition (a bargain at $560/mo), doctors & medical, etc… take up the rest to fill out our zero-based budget.
Good or bad I’m interested to hear what others think our timeline is going to be like.
We will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary in the fall of 2010. Being debt-free-but-the-house would be the best tenth anniversary gift I could imagine. Well, I guess I could imagine stacks of Benjamins and an army of naked Brazillian women… but, no; debt-free would suffice.
That is barely 18 months away — might be too ambitious, but it seems nice to have a goal.
Dreaming on to ten years later: mortgage-free by our twentieth? Oh man! The kids would still be in junior high. I wonder if we can do it.
I wonder.
the Dad
Posted by Mary on 03/04/09 at 11:22 am
It sounds like a worthy goal to me! Have you found any snowball calculators? Isn’t there one on the Dave Ramsey site? How much extra do you have right now to throw at your snowball?
Posted by thedad on 03/04/09 at 11:49 am
We are cutting and trimming the budget just to balance it to zero. Extra cash is
coming from selling stuff!
There are some great snowball calculators out there, but until we get some forward
momentum the snowball just gets bigger when I try them! LOL
So we’re pinching and selling material goods and looking for more income.
If you have a favorite snowball calculator you’ve use please post it here. I know
others would like the link too.
Posted by Johnguy on 03/13/09 at 5:17 pm
I just read your blog after seeiing your post about taxes on the DR messagebord. So does this mean that you are going to have $258 extra to throw at CC4? You are payingoff the first 3, right? If so that is AWESOME! That will almost double the payment you are sending! Congratulations! You will get that ball rolling and will see huge progress. I love your attitude, be on the lookout for those snowflakes….. they can add up quick and evert littlebit helps! Good luck!
Posted by the Dad on 03/13/09 at 5:58 pm
It should, but we are hoping we can put even more on it! Fingers crossed.
Thank you for the kind words!
Posted by Climbing Out » Blog Archive » Taxtion and the Dad Gives Himself a Raise on 03/13/09 at 6:54 pm
[...] back at the State of our union, it looks like that tax return will nearly wipe out our first three cards. Yes! Now you’re [...]
Posted by the Dad on 03/27/09 at 9:42 am
Here is a great FREE debt snowball calculator from Vertex42: http://www.vertex42.com/Calculators/debt-reduction-calculator.html
Posted by Climbing Out » Blog Archive » The Good and the Bad of Arbitrary Goals on 11/16/09 at 9:46 pm
[...] extreme measures or a financial windfall drops in our laps, we are not going to make our goal of Debt-freedom by our tenth anniversary next [...]
Posted by Climbing Out » Blog Archive » A Change of Plans: Three Four Debts I Should Have Told You About on 07/13/10 at 6:56 pm
[...] Last week I told you about getting taxtion and how we were going to wipe out the first three cards in our list of debts. [...]