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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Snow in November!

One day before my birthday it snowed like eight inches!  We got to see how it looks in our new backyard.  The oldest kids stayed out for almost two hours with Sam trying to build an igloo. 






I paid off our student loans and vehicle!

I just felt this had to be announced publicly!  I'm 42 and my student loans are paid off along with both our vehicles. 

We sold the fixer upper property that we had bought end of 2015.  It had become clear to us that renovating that home and paying a mortgage on our new home was not possible so we sold it in October and I've used that money to pay off both student loan and our new-to-us vehicle bought in May/June this year.  We will invest the remaining balance in Vanguard.

So we are down to one debt, our mortgage and after reviewing the payments and seeing only $141.58 goes to principle I'll be happily throwing the money we were spending on student loan/vehicle on the house which is an extra $500 per month.  With the help of Dave Ramsey's mortgage payoff calculator, I see this will shave 6 years, 3 months and 45% savings on interest! 

We made 4 vehicle payments of $288.67 and when I paid off the vehicle, the interest had made it where we had only made a $100 dent in the loan amount.  If that doesn't freak you out enough to make double payments or pay off loans as quickly as possible I don't know what will!  It certainly drove me crazy. 

I hate debt with a passion.  I know some debt like a mortgage is necessary, but I'm counting down the time until that is paid off - 14 years!  Maybe we can get that down to 10 years!  We can only do our best.