Blogging Away Debt

Setting Small Milestones While Paying Off Debt

Over the weekend I was feeling the fatigue of paying off our massive student loans. I just wanted to eat out and buy extra presents with reckless abandon. It’s hard to stay motivated while paying off debt that doesn’t change quickly. I just wanted to feel a win by paying off and eliminating a debt.

I was also frustrated that our shovel of money to put towards debt hasn’t grown this month like we hoped. My side hustles are plugging along, but my husband’s side job (which makes a heck of a lot more than mine) will only get him one shift this month. It’s disappointing.

Thankfully, more than one of you BAD commenters encouraged us to look for small victories and to create milestones as we chip away at our total debt. It’s a marathon not a race. So after a pity party, I did two things this weekend:

Charting Our Progress

I looked over what we’ve paid off in the last year, and decided to put them into charts. I made a bar chart for the past 15 months that is both non-impressive and encouraging. Yes, that crazy-gradual drop is not eye-popping. In fact, it shows that we were stuck paying off interest only for at least 7 MONTHS from September 2018 to March 2019 (insert facepalm).

Chart of Student Loan Principal Payoff

But then in April we put our tax refund towards our debt. This triggered a wake up call this summer that we could be doing a lot more to pay off our student loans. By September we had refinanced with Earnest, which initially (cringe!) bumped our principal up a bit. But then we kept making more progress with our lower interest rate and higher monthly payment.

I then calculated our percent of change. In 2019 (January to November), we’ve paid off $40,953 of our principal, a -12.23% percent change! Considering we had a 0% change for too long, it’s great to see we ARE making progress.

I also decided we needed a visual of our payoff to feel like we were accomplishing something. An adult sticker chart, if you will. I printed off a free chart from Debt Free Charts. I capped it at $300,000 so we’ve only been able to color in a teensy section so far, but somehow there’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from coloring in a line.
Filling in Our Student Loan Payoff From Debt Free Charts

Setting Small Milestone Goals

I then started to brainstorm small wins for our debt payoff in 2020. There’s no debt snowball to motivate us with small victories, so we have to create our own milestones. We most likely won’t put all of our tax refund towards our debt this year (we just purchased some equipment for the business and we need to beef up the business savings account). That means we’re going to have to really hustle to keep up our momentum.

Here are my ideas for milestone goals and rewards:

Order pizza and party when our student loan principal reaches $290,000, $280,000, etc.
Go to the movies when our principal gets lower than our mortgage (which is currently at $279,000)
Stay a night at the beach if we have a 20% change in principal (or get down to around $230,000) in 2020

Long payoffs are really draining. But as we track our progress and celebrate small milestones, I’m hopeful we’ll be able to keep ourselves going.

What small milestones or rewards motivate you to pay off debt?

What is an ‘Emergency’?

by Beks

We had to put our 14-year-old dog down today. His health has been slowly failing and I’ve been ignoring it for as long as possible. If I ignore it, I don’t have to do anything right? Last week, my husband mentioned that it was time. We needed to stop the suffering.

I couldn’t do it.

Yup, I admit was I willing to let my dog suffer because I simply can’t let go.

Last night, my son touched the dog and the dog howled in pain. My husband put his foot down and said I had one night to say goodbye. Ugh! At Christmas too!

We all said goodbye and my husband called the dog to the car. He gently stood up from his bed and obediently followed my husband out the door. He has no idea that today is his last. Oh geez. I’m glad none of you can see me. I’m a total mess as I’m writing this.

It doesn’t help that we lost our other senior dog less than 6 months ago. The kids still talk about how much they miss that dog. This is why you don’t adopt two dogs at the same time!

This loss is big. And the second in a very short time.

Our dogs have been such a big part of our kids’ lives. They love to take them for walks each morning and they argue about who the dogs will sleep with when we camp. Going without one isn’t something I want to do.

Morbid as it sounds, I’ve been budgeting for the vet expense (type A to a fault). I knew it was coming and even started budgeting for a replacement dog. But I didn’t plan on it happening so soon and we are short. We’re short $100 on the vet bill and likely $200 or so on an adoption fee/licensing/ID tags for a replacement dog. The vet bill is clearly an emergency and I’m pulling that from our emergency fund. The replacement dog is where I waiver.

The light in the tunnel is we’re hitting up on Christmas and the hustle and bustle of the holiday is a great distraction. Lots of sleepovers with grandma and cookie making for Santa. We can easily delay it until mid-January and by then, I’ll have the $200 covered if we stay slim on the budget. Had it not been the holiday season I’d be in a bind. But it did cross my mind to declare this an emergency and come home with a dog tomorrow.

Question… would you ever consider replacing a pet an emergency?

Note: Please don’t debate adopting vs breeding. We are shelter folks but even shelter dogs aren’t free.