This is republish of a blog post that’s part of a series “How I Got Out of Debt” when this blog was on Blogger back in Oct 2009. It is still relevant, if not more so given today’s economic environment.
I’m back from part 4 of this series so here’s the post showing where I started on my get the hell out of debt as fast as I can plan. You may recall from a that post in between the debt elimination, I was also saving up for an emergency fund of 1 years worth of expenses. Once that level was achieved, everything extra went towards debt payoff.
Around July 2001 is when I got super duper serious and ready to do just about whatever it took to get the heck out of debt. Now my numbers are slightly off since credit minimum payments are not the same and back then, the minimums were really low percentage wise of the balance owed. Keep in mind the creditors are not trying do you any favors because their mission is to keep you perpetually in debt, thereby making lots of money off you in interest. Though they still do that but it’s my understanding that they have raised the minimum payments which allows you to pay off your debt a microbit quicker. You will see later just how costly it is to remain in debt using myself as an example. Here are the numbers:
Visa – $2371.53, APR 12% approx, $50 per mo.
Household Finance – $1000, APR 9.9%, $19 per mo.
Car Loan – $3571.69, APR 7.9%, $245 per mo.
Capital One – $984.43, APR 9.9%, $19 per mo.
Bank of America – $4588, APR 9.52%, $51 per mo.
Perkins Student Loan – $2027.15, APR 5%, $40 per mo.
Direct Student Loan – $5786.44, APR 4.22%, $52.52 mo.
Mortgage – $48,175, APR 6.25%, $413.06 per mo.
Adding up all the payments, I was paying $889.58 per month just for debt service. $889.58 before I have put any food in my cabinets so I can eat, gas in the car so I can get to work to make the money to pay these bills, insurance for the car I need to drive to get to work to make the money to pay these bills, utilities like water to drink so that I can live to drive to work to make money to pay these bills, etc!! It’s a vicious cycle! 😦
OK, I know y’all are probably wondering how I had such a small mortgage balance. I live in an area of town where the price range for housing goes from $10,000 to $150,000 at the time I bought this house in 2000, which was right about the time prices started really ticking upward. I’ve mentioned before that my home is small, a shoe box by today’s standards but I made a deliberate decision to purchase small and to live in an area of the country where housing prices were reasonable. Of course that means incomes are lower here as well. Also my Direct Student Loan rate started out at 8.25% APR. Later there was a rate reduction some time in 2002 I think, to the 4.22% I have listed.
Alrighty, the order that I have everything listed is the way I paid everything off pretty much after the Direct Student Loan rate reduction. Before, I had it listed right behind Bank of America. Now I bet you are also probably wondering why I have the car loan in front of Capital One which is no longer in my wallet. My reasoning for putting the car loan in front of Capital One even though it has a lower interest rate was because at the time business at the job was going really well. I got paid a base salary and a commission for additional business sold whether that be new business or products. I handled all the paperwork etc for all these transactions whether I sold them or someone else did.
I figured even though the balance is much higher but if I could hurry up and pay it off, I would be applying $245, any extra monies, plus the $20 I was already paying Capital One instead of the other way around.
In addition, the mortgage did not start out at 6.25% APR or $48,175 for that matter. Noooo, I had been dumb and stupid in the years before buying my house. A lot was due to things that were on my credit record from my 1st marriage, but the period after that was all my fault. As a result my credit score was not to good so yeah, I was one of those “sub-prime” borrowers starting out with a 10% APR on a $32,500 1st/12.5% APR $10,000 2nd mortgage with a pre-payment penalty. After about 1 1/2 years of hard work and paying down some of the debt listed above, I was able to refinance in June 2002 to the rate you see above and it was to a 15 year mortgage with only a $6 increase in my payment amount. YAY! The payment was $407 to the previous mortgage holder with the increase in the mortgage balance due to that *#%@ prepayment penalty and outrageous fees. However with the interest rate basically cut in half, a whole lot more of my payment would be going towards principal. I looked at it as another “stupid tax” and hella motivation for me to continue bulldozing this albatross. Nothing motivates me more when I figure out the game. At first I get mad, then get I figure out a way to even.
Next, I’m gonna show you using the numbers presented above and a debt calculator I found online, how much in total I would be paying/paid not using any kind of accelerated plan. Meaning once something was paid off that money was not redirected to debt payoff. This is gonna blow your mind so stay tuned for part 6 of this series.
Related articles
- Gettin’ Outta Debt pt 4-The Contingency aka Emergency Fund (ceraisis.net)
- Gettin’ Outta Debt pt 3 The Debt Snowball (ceraisis.net)
- How I Got Outta Debt: Resources I Used To Become Debt Free pt 2 (ceraisis.net)