It just takes some commitment. There are several ways to get there, you just need to pick what works for you and have the willingness to stick to it.

Oh, and you also have to have a spouse who doesn't buy a $330 "toy" while you're out of town! (To be fair, he hardly ate out this summer, like many husbands might have done if their wives were gone for 3 months.)

Amy, when we were still renting people would talk about their homes and I wanted to cry. I was in default on my student loan, had crap credit, and could only get a secured credit card. Hubby had great credit, but had tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. It was HARD. Took Hubby six years with a credit counseling firm to get the credit cards paid off. Luckily for me, getting married to Hubby made me almost immediately credit-worthy... and then I racked up high balances But it's taken TIME... I think I really, seriously started around 2003, when I finished grad school. First the credit cards - paid one off and that became my pay-off-every-month card (for ordering on line and stuff) - that took about a year or more. Then the other credit cards - pay and put nothing on them (consolidated at a lower rate a few times to speed things up) - that took more like 3 or 4 (or five). Then the student loan - another year and a little more, then the car loan - about a year, then the 403(b) loan - another 9 months or so. And it goes soooooo slooooow at first but once one account is gone, the pace picks up. I couldn't bring myself to do the lowest-balance first (or that would have been my student loan), I had to do the highest-interest first (the credit cards) because I couldn't pay on one thing while watching the interest charges build on the other things or I'dve had constant hives or something But they were the largest balance, so it took a while. The nice thing is the special-interest-rate offers give built-in incentives to pay off fast, before the special rate expires. Some of it got rotated three or four times, but the fees were still less than the interest charges would have been.

So yeah, it's slow and it doesn't show a lot at first but whoo-eee, once it picks up it feels great

A good example of doing what works best for you. The last time I plugged in the numbers to a "snowball calculator" a couple of years ago, it was only going to make a couple hundred dollars difference to tackle the higher imterest first rather than the smaller balance. Total difference, spread over 2 or 3 years of payments. For that little bit i said forget it and went with the mental boost of tackling by size rather than rate. Wirked for me.

Marco!



Nearly there - taxes will likely set me back a bit (I accidentally spent some of the savings on the house loan and haven't built that back up yet, so they will probably have to go on the card.) but about two more months and I'm done with th credit cards.

Then I'll have to decide if I want to put the last of the house loan on a card via transfer. That's only a few thousand left as well, but it's at 10% (still in the mobile home so it's not a mortgage, it's more like a vehicle loan) and I could save quite a bit, I think, by using a zero or low percentage credit transfer. OTOH, once the card payment is gone I'll put that budgeted amount into the loan anyway so it might not make any difference, or very little.

If it's late in the term of the loan, you may have already paid the bulk of the interest already anyway... check the payoff amount to see how much you'd save by transferring, and only if you can transfer before the 0% expires. of course you knew all that, but I'm a worrywart

Thanks to my increasing my retirement funding (lowering taxable income), Hubby's big retro raise payment in November didn't throw our taxes off. We only owe the feds $45! I think that's the closest we've ever come in having our payroll taxes cover our income tax.

Big thumbs up for both of you!!!!

Good for you! You got us beat by many, many dollars. Sean turning 17 last year really bit us in the tax department this year. I wasn't even expecting that, I would have thought it was 18 if Wivabef hadn't mentioned it on FB the other day. I really regret not having pushed to save up some more lately.