Not much better but not much worse

A few weeks have passed now and looking back at our spending habits, not much has actually changed. The exception being that we have continued to aggressively pay down the debt and we have not increased our credit in any way. We are at the limits of pretty much all our cards except for the one we are currently paying off. When it is done we will close it. The down side to this is there is no available credit for the unexpected.

We had a $2000 emergency fund but we bought most of our Christmas presents for each other out of it as well as paying a $330 financial adviser's bill and now it is down to about $900. That normally wouldn't be too bad as we can now build it back up again but I have just resigned my job in preparation for us moving in January. I have a job lined up however there will be 3 or 4 weeks where I won't be receiving a paycheque. During that time my wife will be working night shifts which means no overtime. Things may get a little tight in the new year but after the move my wife switches to a much higher salary so we will be back on track pretty soon.

One of the options we will be weighing up soon is do we continue the snowball to knock over these credit cards or do we go the option of the cheap consolidation loan.

A weekend away

We spent the weekend away and we had a great time. My brother-in-law is a great host and we enjoyed his family's company very much. He looked after us very well including taking us on a tour of the local vineyards and cellar doors. We blew our budget by about $100. This included petrol and buying some thank you groceries and wine so all in all I think that is pretty good. We came home with about 20 bottles of wine and port and it is all stuff we like to drink so I think that $100 over budget isn't too bad.

The cheque arrives

The cheque from the overpayment I made on my electricity account arrived and the money is sitting in our transaction account. I'm going to pay the final $103 of the card we thought we paid off and then put the rest off my store card. Thanks to some aggressive payments on the store card the balance should be around $1500 once I have transferred the remainder of the money from the cheque. Now that they first card as actually paid off we will be paying off the store card at a minimum rate of $450 per month. So in the worst case we will be cancelling that card in 3 months time. I am hoping to pay it off sooner, however, by putting as much spare money onto it as I can. After that we will go for my personal loan, which should by then have a sub $4000 balance. We will have an extra $450, on top of the $333 regular payment, in which to pay it off. At that rate we will have the loan paid off after another 5 months and then out snowball amount will be close to $800!

Wine

My wife and I have been discussing a weekend away to buy some wine for about six months and now the chance has finally come. This coming weekend we are both free of other events and we have decided to go. We will stay with my wife's brother which will help keep down the costs. The only real expense we should have will be a tank of fuel to get there and back. We have been putting all our spare change into a piggy bank for the last few years and it is finally time to crack it open and spend! We opened it last night and 50 minutes later we had separated out the different denominations of coins and estimated a total in excess of $300. That should amount to a pretty fun weekend.

We don't pay off the first card

When I asked my wife how much I had to pay of the card to close it she told me the available limit instead of the balance. To make a long story short, we still owe $103 on that card. Oh well, we will pay it off next pay day.

We pay off the first card

We have paid off the first credit card! It only had a $1000 limit (and a $1000 balance) and it is a very small step in the big scheme of things but it feels so good. As soon as the money that we just paid clears my wife will call them to cancel the card. I can't wait! Not only have we decreased the amount we owe and our credit limit but we have also increased the amount we can now pay on the remaining cards and loans. Our next goal is to pay off a store card which currently has a balance of $1700. We have already been paying this one off quickly because we need to get the balance to zero before the interest free period runs out. With the extra $100 a month we had been paying of the other card we will get there almost twice as quickly. We will also put any other spare money off it as well.

Once that card is paid off and cancelled I think we will go for the personal loan. Because it is relatively low interest with regular repayment, conventional wisdom tells us to leave it till last. If, however,we pay it off and add the regular repayments to our snowball we will have around $800 per month to pay off the next card. Then we will really be moving!

Take care in the supermarket

I have been taking extra care when I've gone to the supermarket to buy a few things that those few things don't turn into a few more. Every time I've gone in the last 2 weeks I have had a list of stuff to buy and I've stuck to the list 100%. Every time I see extra things that I could buy but I ignore them and stick to the list. I want to learn to take the impulse out of shopping and I'm sure that it will just take a bit of self-discipline and prior planning. I just wish I had some proper historical data so I could compare my new grocery bills with my old ones.