Sunday, November 1, 2009

Giving up to gain later

Towards the beginning of the year my husband asked if I would join in for a finance class. I have often been the one to suggest such things so for him to suggest it was surprising so I jumped at the chance to participate - well it was Dave Ramsey's FPU. We entered it with a sizeable amount of debt made up of a little credit card, some car and a lot of student loans. We knew when we started that we couldn't start the debt snowball in full force b/c we were expecting our 2nd child in the fall so we put away money in preparation of that. Well in the process we made the decision to sell our fairly new van in an attempt to be quick about knocking out the debt. I wasn't a van person until we purchased it and had since fallen in love with it so needless to say I wasn't happy about the idea. So we tried to sell it in early summer but had no takers. We tried again in October and sold it to the first person who responded to the Craigslist ad for a good but fair amount. Some would call us crazy of course but it certainly takes a load off of my mind to be done with that debt. We were able to find the same model just older and with 100K miles and pay cash for it using what we got from the other van minus the loan amount. So after we pay off the credit car we will have roughly 30K of student loans left to pay off. I would like to feel the light it at the end of the tunnel but 30K still seems like a lot! We are budgeting and trying to cut costs in as many ways as we can - stopped cable, stopped cleaning service, went to pay as you go cell phone. We tend to lose momentum towards the end of the month. Hopefully our recent sale of the van will give us the boost we need to continue to persevere. 

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