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As I mentioned last month, both H and I were feeling pretty frustrated with our finances. Since then, we had a talk and decided to set a budget for ourselves, which I talked about a bit ago when I talked about our marriage finances. We just started it in april, and we are currently working through the kinks and making some tweaks to get things right – which I’ll detail in a later post. On the upside, it’s working pretty well, but on the downside it looks like we may have to bump up the amount for each of us. Other than that, things went pretty well in april, and we are getting super duper close to having the truck paid off.
Debt:
These are all of our debts. Right now, that includes a vehicle loan, a mortgage and 1 student loan. When I started, I had 3 credit cards, 3 student loans and no vehicle loans. I’m married now, and everything that I’m still paying off now (with the exception of the student loan) has been incurred since I’ve tried to become debt free. Funny how that works out, eh?
House
Mortgage $116,922 ($540) – Same monthly payment here. Once the truck is paid off, I think H and I are going to move the payments around a bit on this. I’m not exactly sure what we are going to do, but I think we will probably see if we can switch to bi-weekly payments, which will have us making 1 extra payment per year, and we will probably bump up the payment amount, so we will be over paying every two weeks as well, but we need to figure out an amount.
Student Loans
Great Lakes Loan $ 8,823 ($128) I bumped this up to 175 a while back, but this is going down slowly. This could also be getting a bit of a bump once the truck is paid off, but I’m not sure how much quite yet. I’m really not too concerned with this loan, even though it’s probably the most significant liability on the balance sheet. I can sell my car for way more than I owe at the moment, and the same is true for the house – so those debts are easy to unload. I cant really sell my brain.
Truck Loan
Ford Credit: $ 799 ($1613): We made some huge strides here, knocking down 66% of the amount remaining on the loan in this month alone! With just 800 bucks left, this will be paid off in may – probably as soon as H and I get paid. It will be really, really nice to be free of this loan. The cash flow added is $315 alone, and that’s not counting whatever I can wring out of my insurance company per month in savings. We could be talking an extra $400 that we are getting back, per month! This note had a 6 year term, and may will be 3.25 years since I bought the truck.
Total Debt: $126,545 ($2281) – Another month of 2k+ debt reduction, which is awesome. It’s going to be really nice once the cash from the truck comes back – that’s been eating at my paycheck for what seems like forever. I’m not sure if we will continue to snowball that wholly into the student loan, or if we use it to beef up the emergency fund a bit, but I’ll write out something when the time comes.
Health Goals
Ive continued training for the death race, but lately I’ve been wondering if I’m doing the wrong training. There’s a facebook group for everyone in the deathrace, and one set of guys ran 3 marathons in one day after the bombings in boston – 1 marathon for each victim! My training isnt quite that hardcore yet (Nor will it be by june) but I feel like I’m at least making progress. I’ve got a post partially written on this, but havent finished it yet.
The diet changes are still stuck in neutral. For a while I was gaining 5lbs on the weekend, then losing it all by the thursday only to start again. I’ve pretty much knocked off the whole “way unhealthy on the weekends thing” but I’m not seeing as much difference as I thought I would yet.
I’m still carrying my pack to work to train for the death race, and I add weight to it at the beginning of every month. I’ve leveled off the pack at an even 50 lbs, which is more than what I expect to race with – mainly because my pack was starting to rip. I’m looking to get a new one in the future before the race.
I’m also doing my first long training session this weekend, and it’s probably going to be pretty rough. I’ve asked my taskmaster to keep me busy for around 15 hours, and he said that he’s pretty sure it’ll come pretty close to that. I have no idea what to expect, only a small list of things that I need to bring along.
Goal Workouts: 30
Total Workouts: 45