by Tricia
I ended up being pretty busy last week, and this week looks like much of the same. But there are some updates I want to give so I thought I would put them all in one post.
First of all, I’ll answer some questions:
Arduous asked
…It seems to me that $833 a month is doable though, so I am looking forward to a big old blog party in May of 2009. How much per month have you been managing lately? It seems like you’ve been paying off much more than that.
Let’s see…I’ll look at the past five months:
November 2007 = $743
December 2007 = $1,843
January 2008 = $965
February 2008 = $2,300
March 2008 = $701
It seems like every other month we have a really good debt payoff month. The months that aren’t as great are the months where our health insurance premiums are due (we pay $800 every two months). We have been averaging about $1,300/month.
Danielle asked:
Where did the $600 come from? Did you sell something?
It’s funny because I try not to give out too much specific financial information on here. I have to guard it somewhat. But, when I pay off a chunk of debt you can be pretty certain a pay day occurred not too long ago. I forecast our cash flow months in advance, so I can gauge how much money we have for everything except our debt. Extra money is sent to the credit card before it can spend it somewhere else.
In this case, I also sold some advertising on my other blog. So that is part of it as well. It is also the off-month where we don’t have to pay our health insurance premium 😉
Now for an update on my husband’s job search.
There are still some resumes floating out there, but the jobs to apply to within his field are very slim. Maybe it’s a reflection of the economy right now. So we discussed it, and came to a decision. We are going to stay put where we are and bring to life the idea I had over a year ago. My husband will be doing the majority of the work and is not seeking employment elsewhere.
As a refresher, my idea involved about $500 as seed money to buy what we need. It’s a far cry from the $10,000 we spent towards our first business attempt (that didn’t get off the ground). We also were able to use CASH this time around, which is always a plus.
I think you know that it’s hard for me to part with a chunk of change like that. That’s why we didn’t do anything related to my idea for a year. I have had one serious case of debt tunnel vision. But a chat with someone woke us both up. We’ve already lost a year that we could have been working on it. We can’t lose any more.
In case that little birdie that woke us up is reading…thank you 🙂
How will this affect our debt reduction right now? Probably not too much. Our income should stay fairly constant at this point and all of the numbers I crunched show that we will be able to meet the $833/month payments to our debt (on average). My idea should start helping with income in six months or so.
I’m excited, because for the first time in quite a while I feel like we are looking to the future.
