photo credit: fotograf1v2

Glancing at the calendar, I notice that almost half of the month has disappeared in a pile of other people’s tax documents. The brain is just a little crispy right now…

Which is not to say that little has gotten done with our debt destruction progress. Actually, all of a sudden our future debt reports have gotten incredible simple. Not that they were all that complicated to begin with, but by the end of this month, the report would consist of a single line containing our mortgage balance.

That’s right. As of sometime next week, when our medical bill shows up and we write out one more check, we could call up Dave and shout WE’RE DEBT FREE! Well, except for the mortgage, which Dave seems OK with. Which always felt a bit disingenuous to me, when most people’s biggest debt is an oversized mortgage, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.

So, how did we kill off $27k+ in a single month? More awesome side job income? Nah. I didn’t tap those funds at all. Just letting those stockpile up for the time being for next year’s tax bill. Instead, we finally got rid of my father’s gift, which covered the loans taken out against it along with leaving a few thousand extra to work with. We plan to kill off the last of our medical and use the rest as an initial boost to a real emergency fund. OK, and we may blow just a bit of it celebrating.

Anyway, enough prattling on. Let’s take a peak at what is probably the final State of the Debt report:

So what’s ahead?

The State of the Debt reports are probably done. Seems a bit boring to report something like ‘Yep, made another mortgage payment.’ I fully intend to accelerate paying that mortgage off as quickly as possible, but a monthly report on that progress? Eh. Maybe in passing I’ll mention milestones, but really, I’ll have to see if I can come up with something a little funner to point out…

Like I alluded to, a real emergency fund, in the neighborhood of six to twelve months of expenses. Haven’t sat down to ponder the exact level, but somewhere in there. Our miniature one has come in handy when stumbling blocks appeared along this path, but having something substantial in place should a more extreme emergency make an appearance definitely would be a good idea. Plus, having that to fall back on gives you freedom to take advantage of opportunities you’d otherwise be hesitant to consider otherwise.

More life simplification. In my free time (in other words, not in the last six weeks or so) I’ve been reading quite a bit on life hacking. Think along the lines of books such as:

• Margin by Swenson
• Your Money or Your Life By Dominguez & Robin
• The 80/20 Principle by Koch
• The Myth of Multitasking by Crenshaw

Like too many people anymore, I spend far too much time doing things that add far too little to my life, and far too little on the things that actually do.

I will be correcting that imbalance.

photo credit: Andrew Huff

A quick thought on the title: With my brother and sister both in from their respective corners of the country to celebrate Thanksgiving as well as my side’s Christmas, far too many opportunities to partake were presented. And, quite honestly, fully taken advantage of.

I don’t know about you, but I could probably skip eating for well into December and be just fine calorie-wise.

On that thought, we again had a comparatively frugal Christmas. And in the end, we were again just happy to be able to spend some time together without the day-to-day distractions that make you to forget what is really important. Namely, those close to us.

But we’re here to talk about some dollars, so on to the money front. While we knocked off right around our average debt amount, our earnings, well, soared. Like last month, the big push for November was definitely of the shovel building variety.

I really worked at the system I’ve been following, and have managed to more than double our income for November. In fact, depending on how a thing or two shakes out, it may be closer to tripling it! I still have to wait until mid-December for November’s commission checks to arrive, so again, nothing has been applied to the debt as of yet.

We will have to wait and see if anything approaching this level is maintainable outside of the holiday season. But unless I really ramp things up in an extreme way, I’ve finally reached the point where I can comfortably draw on this business’ earnings without slowing future progress down.

I have a feeling we are going to start seeing some major debt destruction in the near future!

photo by dewonn43

Ah, another month passes, and another cool thousand (and change) disappeared from that big ol’ total. Slow and steady. Blah, blah, blah.

While debt reduction is certainly way up there on our priorities, this month’s focus was elsewhere. Namely, as Dave would say, I spent a fair amount of free time the last month or two building a bigger shovel.

I’ve spent spare time in the evenings playing around with Adwords ad campaigns, and have stumbled upon a system that is doing well for me. Well enough that I’m considering shutting down my side business in the very near future. Well enough that, assuming I can continue to steadily grow it, may see me making it my primary income, for that matter. Well enough that I wake up excited to get back to it. Enjoying what you do cannot be overrated!

But those successes have not been reflected in our debt progress yet, as everything is ramping up so quickly. Yesterday’s earnings are bankrolling tomorrow’s increased earnings. I’ve literally quadrupled what I made in September’s this October, but that entities’ account (a good business owner knows that he should keep his monies separate, don’t ya’ know) shows as close to zero. At least, until my commissions come in in a couple weeks. Which I’ll then use to keep the ball rolling into December. Oh, sure, I could slow down and draw some of that out as profit. But with the holidays coming up, that seems like a shortsighted thing to do!

So it looks like we’re in collapse and people are killing each other in the streets. Oh, wait, no, not really.

Sure, the markets are having a fit, which makes it painful to look at our retirement accounts. Except that we aren’t planning on touching them for many years, so eh. Feel a little bad for the baby boomers inching up on retirement, but really, not much. Yes, I know that schadenfreude isn’t exactly a positive emotion or anything, but many of them have defined their lives by excess so they shouldn’t be surprised when it comes around to bite ‘em. A little frugality isn’t perhaps a terrible thing.

photo credit: missdesigndiva

Meanwhile our politicians are tripping over themselves trying to do, well, I don’t really know. Looks like they are hellbent on trying to find a way to spend my son’s future income in an effort to stave off what will be an admittedly painful correction. Personally, being a free market kind of guy, I say go ahead and let it correct. But I am probably missing the big picture.

That said, at least in our household, things are certainly not flying off track. In fact, despite the supposed tightening of the credit market, we just received notice that one of our credit cards has substantially increased it’s limit. Thanks, but we really don’t need it. We won’t mention that to the government, because they may just decide they need that as well!

We did a decent job of killing off more debt this month. Broke well past the $1000 mark. And honestly are still living quite comfortably even with that kind of progress. We could probably introduce a little more pain and get the ball rolling a little faster. But that’s a budgeting issue, not a reporting one.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently with my side business, and it’s beginning to really take off. Right now it is not adding any to our debt attack plan, as I am stockpiling cash right now in anticipation of further expansion. The holidays are rapidly approaching, and I have a feeling I’ll be spending a fair amount on advertising soon!

Oh, and oops, I will take a cue from Wall Street and restate some debt. I misread a medical bill statement and understated that debt by around $800. Where’s my bailout?

photo credit: StreetFly JZ

As expected, we suffered a little setback in debt reduction progress this month when a batch of medical bills arrived. And just as expected, there is no such thing as a cheap medical procedure, so of course we maxed out my wife’s portion of the deductible. Since the deductible on the plan I get through work is fairly high, well, likewise our final bill.

The first obvious lesson is that going without health insurance in this day and age is a sure route to financial ruin. I’m not thrilled with a fairly large bill, but it could have been far larger had we been without coverage!

And since health insurance was forefront in our minds, the wife and I decided to do a little comparison shopping to see what it would cost to get a decent policy on our own. One with perhaps a better deductible. Maybe look into a HSA to get a little tax advantage. That sort of thing.

We used the health coverage comparison engine at eHealthInsurance to look into a pretty broad range of policies. One things was obvious from the get go: we could — assuming we qualify for the plans, of course — get health insurance for a heck of a lot cheaper than what my employer is currently paying on us. Especially after an upcoming rate increase goes into effect.

I broached the subject of dropping us from the group coverage and instead getting a salary increase on par with the plan’s premium with my employer, and he certainly didn’t rule the idea out. So yesterday we submitted an application to see if we could qualify for one of the mid-range plans that meets our needs, halves our deductible(!), and qualifies as an HSA plan to boot.

Anyway, enough rambling for today. On to the raw numbers:

photo credit: ToniVC

Summer has finally made itself fully known, and walking outside is like walking into a sauna. Which is fine if I wanted a sauna, but not so fine if I just wanted to go for a walk. So, what better time to break out ye’ olde spreadsheet and see what kind of progress was made in killing off debt last month?

Summer always seem to be a little more expensive for us than other times of the year. After all, when it’s snowing and 7 degrees, we are perfectly content not wandering much and just staying warm inside here at home.

But it being a beautiful summer, we felt like wandering a bit. We made our annual pilgrimage to my extended family reunion, and decided to take a couple extra days to see my wife’s brother nearby while we were in the area. We did do a budget for the vacation, but it being one of those things we didn’t regularly budget for in the past (otherwise known as everything), we didn’t end up budgeting enough. A couple extra meals out, a few too many trips to the coffee shop, some random spending, and the bottom line showed us a couple hundred overspent.

I was a little disappointed, but wasn’t extraordinarily bothered by it. My wife? Borderline stroke. I had no idea how deeply the get-out-of-debt bug I brought home had bitten her! A few serious conversations about our goals and progress and such, and she relaxed a bit while also imbuing in me a little extra motivation to kick a few things into higher gear…

photo credit: Daveybot

Spring ends, summer begins, more debt goes to the great beyond. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?

Yet another month of incremental debt killing. While I could have boosted the damage done to the final tally a bit by using returns from my expanding online marketing side business, right now I’m comfortable using the funds to reinvest in what’s been working. Maybe next month I’ll throw the excess at the debt, but for now having the ability to use the play I have in that side business’s cash flow to experiment has proven useful.

Likewise, I’m sure we could have trimmed more, but going over our spending versus the budget it looks like we did a little comfort spending in June. In the end, it is just money, and we needed a little cheering up more than we needed to knock a couple hundred more off the total, so c’est la vie. Speaking of, we are still waiting to hear on medical bills associated with our loss. Since we have a pretty substantial deductible, unless medical procedures have gotten cheap all of a sudden, the ol’ total is almost certainly going to suffer a brief reversal soon.

Anyway, for those into specifics, here ya’ go:

photo credit: PhotoA.nl

Despite the ominous sounding headline I threw up there, the financial front of our little family ended the month making decent forward progress. Oh, sure, I would have loved to knock another few thousand a month off that total. And with our little stimulus payment (my apologies future generations!) coming in, I thought we might just have the chance to bite of a bigger chunk.

Some more good news: My little sis did manage to get herself hitched. To a guy I really like. And looked absolutely ecstatic the whole time. And while our gift spending was out of the ordinary monthly range, the wedding was no surprise and we had budgeted for that spending. So it made almost no dent finance-wise. And hey, it’s my little sister. I’m absolutely thrilled that she’s thrilled.

Looking good at knocking off that chunk so far! But alas, Murphy had other ideas. At least he had the good graces to wait to show up until we had a bit of extra coin around.

We’ve been working on growing our little family for several months without luck, until early last month when my wife shared a little good news with me one evening. Several visits to our wonderful doc later, and alas, it was not meant to be this time around. Whether at seven weeks or seven months, irregardless of how great anything else went, this type of loss makes for a rotten month.

Here’s to a better June!

photo credit: rickz

Two weeks to go, and I get a breather! Oddly, I know I’ll miss the chaos and the end-of-the-day mental exhaustion when it’s over. But I’m looking forward to having time to focus on my side business replacement project, which is beginning to show some of the decline that two months+ of almost complete neglect tends to produce!

On the debt front, as you can see we managed to kick out well over $1,000 this month:

A slow but steady chipping away. I’ll definitely take it!

Over the years, our family Christmas gatherings had been getting more and more overblown. The wife and I each come from fairly small families, so it wasn’t that we were buying for a ridiculous number of people. But for each of them, a number of not inexpensive gifts would find their way under the tree. In other words, far too many gifts costing far too much money.

Since we have finally come to the realization that more does not equal better, last year we scaled back our gifting giving quite a bit. It wasn’t a ‘just sock-n-underwear‘ Christmas by any means, but it also wasn’t a ‘hey, could you lend me a hand carrying all these boxes in?‘ one like in the past.

One gift we gave to our younger brothers and sisters on both sides last year was a copy of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, in an attempt to give them some alternatives before they ended up dealing with painful levels of debt. And they read it! My sister and fiance even went so far as to tell me that it has changed their lives. Never heard that when I was giving out, say, $200 DVD players…

Needless to say, this year revealed much more subdued gift giving all around. And guess what? We had just as much fun, appreciated everything just as much, and had even more time just to enjoy everyone’s company. Amazing how that works…

Hope you and yours had a Great Christmas!