October Update

Ten months down and two more to go. I could never have imagined all that this year held for us, but in spite of everything I think we have done an amazing job!

Overall Debt:

Starting 1/1/2013: $62,300.13

Current 10/31/2013: $42,404.91

Total paid: $19,895.22

I can not believe that we have paid off nearly 1/3rd of our debt in just one year! And we will hit $20,000 as soon as I get my next paycheck (but that will go towards November's update!). 

And on the "racing" front, the debt we are paying extra on and trying to eliminate as soon as possible, here's where we stand:

Starting 1/1/2013: $24,500.00

Current 10/31/2013: $9,900.00

Total paid: $14,600.00

Obviously this is where most of our payoff has taken place. We had wanted to have this at $0 by the end of the year, but life happened. We still got it down under 5-digits. This is all at 0% until June 2014, so we are taking our time here and will have it paid off by then.

We are also making some changes to reduce our monthly expenses. We changed up our daycare arrangement a bit which will save around $200, and we are in the middle of refinancing the house which will save another $100. We are also considering trading in our Explorer for a nice sedan that DH can drive to save on gas mileage. We like the big car, but with me driving downtown every day and DH driving all over the place for appointments, it does not make sense for us to have a car that only gets 17mpg on a good day. We don't need the car to tow anything and it only snows 2-4 times a year here. A front-wheel or all-wheel drive car is really all we need to get around if we do have to get out. While trading in the car would be a setback in our overall amount owed for awhile, it wouldn't take too long to catch up. We may save a bit on the monthly payments and we will definitely save on gas each month.