Kim | April 27, 2010
So in the last month or so, things have been crazy busy. Hurrah for two kids. But, it’s been good for our pocketbook: – We paid off my Perkins loan ($3000) and the rest of the smallest loan I had ($2200). We’ve paid off around $9500 since January 1, 2010. You can see the Debt [...]
Kim | March 19, 2010
Right before Benedict was born, we sent out our loan payments. So far, so good. For my smallest loan, only $7.91 went to interest, the rest sweet glorious principal. The next payment will push the principal below $2200, which really makes me happy. Greg’s part of The Beast is still obscene – only $15 to [...]
Kim | February 22, 2010
Taking care of things like balancing the checkbook this morning, I decided to check and see if the lender had applied my payment to my part of THE BEAST. Sure enough, they did. And this makes me a happy camper – the total balance is really under $40K and about half went to principal, and [...]
Kim | February 19, 2010
I checked our local student loan balances (of the four, two are serviced locally and two are out of state). Good news and bad news. The good news is that my local loan – also the smallest student loan we have – got hit HARD on the principal. Only $6 went to interest, the rest [...]
Kim | February 17, 2010
There is an estimated $730 billion in outstanding federal and private student-loan debt, says Mark Kantrowitz of FinAid.org, a Web site that tracks financial-aid issues — and only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment, which means that payments and interest are halted, or in “forbearance,” [...]
Kim | February 5, 2010
It’s been about 2.5 months since we stopped using our credit card totally. We’ve gone to a mixture of cash and using the debit card, and surprisingly; we have a lot more money on our hands. Granted, paying off the credit card bill and the car loan is helping that out; but not (over)spending the [...]
Kim | January 26, 2010
Because I’m sure everyone is itching to know how much student loan debt we have, I made a page for it. Actually, I wanted a page with a debt progress bar; and I finally found a suitable WordPress plugin for that. You can access it by clicking “The Debt” tab at the top or by [...]
Kim | January 2, 2010
It’s only 2 days into the New Year, and we basically have finished two of our four financial goals. After a lot of pondering and thinking about our situation and looking at all sorts of angles, we decided it would be more prudent to pay off the credit card and the minivan with the money [...]
Kim | December 30, 2009
Here are our goals for 2010, with regards to our finances: Finish our Baby Emergency Fund ($1000) so we can begin knocking out our debts. Done! Start paying cash only, saving the debit card for online and gas purchases. Pay off the flaming credit card bill and the car loan before the end of the [...]