Credit score, monthly progress update, budgeting fun

826

That was my credit score when we went to get my new car. We knew that around 700s were good credit scores. We were both shocked by how high my credit score was though, considering how much debt I still have with school loans. The dealer said usually only 80 year old women have a credit score that high. Who knows! We definitely didn't complain though because that allowed us to get a lower interest rate to finance my new car. 

About the new car- I was not excited to have to get a new car:( I loved my Honda that I've had since high school (and I LOVED not having a car payment!!). The rule of thumb for us though is that when the repairs on a car start to cost more than the car is worth, it's time for a new car. We haven't had a car payment but since we have been working hard on paying down debt and lowering our monthly debt amount, a car payment is affordable. We decided to finance the car over the longest amount possible (six years) so that the monthly payment amount was lower. As with everything else, we will pay the car off early and therefore the six year term really won't matter. We do it this way so that if there is a month where we have unexpected costs come up, we can still manage to pay everything that we owe. We also inquired about the difference in cost over the life of the car if we took the full six years to pay it off. Because our interest rate was so low, it would only add about $1,000 to the cost of the car. Obviously we don't want to pay more than we have to but in the grand scheme of things on a high ticket item, $1,000 isn't too bad. 

Onto our debt progress.

Things haven't moved quiet as quickly as I would have hoped. We have been super busy lately with work and studying for my LPC test so I haven't been able to post for a while.  We are currently at

$64,492

for my school loan total. We paid off our largest loan last month (yay!!). That won't actually drop our monthly payment at all because since we had paid such a large sum on that loan initially, we had no payment due until 2017 (another trick from the company to let interest build up). All of our other loans do have monthly payment amounts so from here on out, each loan we pay off will save us a little bit each month on our monthly amount due. I have 12 loans left to pay off!  That number can be deceiving! Some of those loans are $2,000 or less which will get paid off quickly, but still others are about $12,000 and will take much longer to pay off. We are still on this journey in hopes of being debt free in the three year time frame. I'm not sure how that will work out but we are trying! Things always come up! Doctor bills, car payments, LPC test (which cost almost $400 for the study material and the test itself- CRAZINESS!!). We try our best to stay on track. For us, summer will likely mean not having as much money left to go towards loans because of the different trips we are going on. I feel like that is okay because we work really hard on putting almost half of our money to debt and therefore taking a little bit of extra money to do things in the summer is not a big deal. I guess we have 32 months to go which would mean about $2,015 a month from here on out. Once our monthly payments drop by paying off individual loans, that total per month should also decrease. 

How are you guys doing on your budget tools? Has it made any difference yet?

On a different note, I passed my LPC exam! Once my license comes in the mail, I will officially be a Licensed Professional Counselor in Virginia. Woohoo! Hopefully many doors will open that will help to pay that debt off in the time frame we are going for:)