New Year, Same Journey

I am pretty terrible at keeping up with this blogging thing. I happened to come across a link to it while posting elsewhere and thought I'd come write an update as to where we are as we enter 2014. The sad fact is that while I feel like we're making progress, our total debt has stayed pretty stagnant over the years. Actually, we have more debt now than we did when we started this journey in 2010. On a positive note though, we have a game plan to get us through this year and it's pretty solid.

We are starting 2014 with $199,678.70 in debt. We entered 2013 with $202,017.31, so we have seen a slight decrease. Based on our payoff schedule, we'll be at $160,717.99  at the end of 2014. This will pay off all of our credit cards except for one, which is the one we use for day to day purchases. It gives us 1% cashback into a high interest savings account, and once the rest of our debt is paid off, it will be easy to pay that card off in a month or two. or May 2015 at the latest.

I'd like to take stock of what I did in 2013, since the numbers do not reflect success at all.

• I paid off my husband's Best Buy credit card. We did use it for Christmas, but it will be paid off in a few months. We only used it for Christmas because of the 0% interest for 18 months. It will  be paid off before 18 months. Payments have already been scheduled to accomplish this.
• We paid off the Target credit card, which charges over 18% interest. We used this for purchases over Christmas, because it gave us free shipping and 5% off the purchases. It will be paid off this month.
• We paid off my husband's Credit Union card in December 2012, entering 2013 with a $0 balance.
• I transferred higher interest balances to 0% interest cards;  one 0% for 12 months, the other for 15 months. The 12 month card will be paid off in October and the 15 month card will be paid off next December.
• I paid off my Perkins Loan! This was done in December and was a little bit of a Christmas gift to myself. It was a small payment, but the interest rate was 5% and the loan was smallish after paying on it for the last eight years. I only paid it off two years early, but baby steps. It was very freeing to not have to pay that loan this month.

As for what I plan to accomplish in 2014:

• January I will pay off our Target card from Christmas.
• February I will pay off our Home Depot card before it begins accruing interest.
• October I will pay off our Chase card.
• November I will pay off the Best Buy card from Christmas.
• December I will pay off the Discover Card.
• December I will pay off the 401k Loan I took out last year, three years early.

As always, the biggest obstical I face in paying off our debt is my husband's belief that we can't do it. He feels like we've been talking about paying off debt for so long that it's all talk, that nothing will ever change, that it's a pipe dream. Even when I show him the payoff scheduled with cold, hard dates, he still thinks that I'm living in a dream world and that it will never happen. We are averaging more than $1500 a month in credit card payments this year, in an effort to pay them off quickly. That's on top of paying  $620 a month for our cars, $800 a month for our mortgage, $118 a month on my student loan, and even more for our utilities and insurance. Getting that money back into our bank account in 2015.... I can't wait. I just can't wait.