Credit Card update

As of this writing 6/20/08 my credit card has a balance of $2,467.51. It finally went under $3,000, seems like it took forever. Unless something major happens we won’t make my early goal for a June payoff but honestly I’m ok with that. I think seven months to pay off more than $12,000 in debt is still pretty amazing. June has been an expensive month for us, but I’ll have more about that later. Even with the added expenses it looks like we may be able to have the card 100% paid off by the end of July. My calculations show we’ll be about $600 short, but I think we should be able to make it happen, as long as we use some creative thinking.

Then the fun starts.

I’ve spent some time thinking about what we’ll do with all that extra money each month. And I won’t lie there have been moments when big splurges come into mind. I would really like to upgrade our T.V. get some new furniture or even buy that new car everyone is telling me I need. Ultimately, I don’t think a lot will change for us financially. We do plan to increase some of our spending funds like the entertainment and gift money. Mainly I hope things stay the same. Using every penny to pay off our cards has taught us a lot about what we really need and how we spend our money. Even though we’ll have more available money we plan to use it to start an emergency fund, a retirement account and a few other things so I don’t think too much will change for us. In fact I hope we’ll be able to save even more money by some of the things we’ve learned during this process. One thing I’ve learned is that living financially smart is pretty easy. We actually eat better since clipping coupons.

All I know for sure is that I never, ever want to pay off $12,000 in debt again. Especially, when we can’t even remember what that money was spent on.