Day 1 of Year 1 - Happy New Year

Thank you for visiting my site.  First and foremost, I want to wish every one a very Happy New Year!

Now let's get on to the meat of the subject.  The reason I created this site is to document my journey to becoming debt free (debt-free)!  I was never really sure if it's two separate words or one word connected by a hyphen, but I digress.  I really believe by documenting my journey, it will give me the proper motivation to stay on track and not fall by the wayside.  I have been using Mint's budgeting software for the past few years.  But if you go back through my history, 95% of the time, I have gone over most of my budgeted items, if not all!  So maybe by sharing my journey, everyone who is trying to become debt-free as me can keep me accountable.





I will also share on this blog about my journey of fatherhood.  I have a son, Eli, who is now 13 months old.

To make things more interesting, my wife is 4 weeks pregnant!!!!!!!

I also have a labrador mix which we consider as our child as well.  

Here they are below:

There is this awesome excel file that was created by Vertex42.com and can be found here.  Basically, you get to enter all your debt information, can order it using the debt snowball or avalanche method, and see how long it'll take you to pay off all your debt: 9 years for us. 

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the debt snowball or avalanche method, it's pretty simple really:

Debt Snowball - listing all your debts and balances from the smallest balance to the highest regardless of the interest on the debt.  Then you continue to pay the minimum payment on all your debt balances while throwing as much extra money as you can to the smallest payment.  Once you have paid off your smallest balance, you add the minimum payment you were paying on the smallest payment to the next debt balance on your list and so on and so forth.  The #1 reason for doing it this way is because when you keep paying off your balances, it triggers a psychological motivation to help you keep on track and keep paying off your debt!

Avalanche Method - this method lists all your debt from the highest interest to the lowest and paying off the highest interest first.  At the end of the day, you'll save a little or a lot more money depending on the size of your balances.

Now back to the excel file that I was talking about.  I'm actually going to show you images below of what it looks like for me.

There are two worksheets in the spreadsheet, Calculator and PaymentSchedule.  The first two images below are the calculator.

The third image below is the PaymentSchedule worksheet:

The method that I chose was to pay off my wife's student loan first (which has the highest interest rate), then our car payment, then our mortgage.

The reason for this order is because we can be completely debt-free excluding the mortgage by 2.5 years.  I think with a 13 month old and a new baby on the way, 2.5 years should go by quick!

To be completely debt-free, if by the miracle and Grace of God we stay on budget, we should be completely debt-free by April, 2023!

I will do my best to create a new post each and every day but most likely not  =P.

Unfortunately, English and writing was my worst subject in school and I still don't like to write.  But writing this blog isn't as bad since it's about subjects that I am passionate about: my family and becoming debt-free.  So I would like to think of this as simply thinking out loud.

So my journey begins now!!!  

Day 1 of 3,287 days....

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