As of July 5, 2012, we are $494,730.60 in debt (that includes the mortgage). Without the mortgage, we’re at $64,572.60 in debt. This includes credit cards, student loans, lines of credit and an auto loan. We do however have $828,787.37 in assets (including our house), so we’re still in the positive net worth department. This is mostly because we’ve been working since graduating college (and I was working before I did), and we’ve put aside a lot of money in retirement accounts – enough to get the match for each of our employers: $203,400.95 And we continue to put in the minimum we need to get our match. My current 401(k) isn’t in there as the really crappy Mass Mutual doesn’t support online aggregation (can you feel the vitriol coming out of my fingers?). I think it’s about $1800 right now – my company just switched to it at the beginning of the year.
We’ve been really focused on paying down the debt while maintaining our retirement contributions. I read Dave Ramsey‘s Total Money Makeover a few months ago (checked out from the library!) and got a fire lit under my ass. I don’t completely follow his baby steps, but they call to me, and we’re doing a modified version of them. Baby step one is to have $1000 in an emergency fund for when Murphy visits. Murphy has been a frequent visitor to our family, and so we increased our emergency fund to $5000, instead of $1000. Now, we’re on baby step 2 – pay down debt. Instead of paying off our smallest debt – we’re paying off the highest interest rate debt – which at the time was 15.99% on the Discover card. Then we moved to paying off the 14.99% on the Citibank – now we’re working on the 8.75% of the line of credit. My mathematical mind doesn’t see paying off $8k on the smallest debt when we were paying $300/mth in interest on 15.99%. So we’re at Dave’s baby step 2, and expect to be here for the next two years.
Debt (in the order we’re paying it down):
- Line of credit (8.75%): $14,011.33
- Student loans (aggregated 5.52%): $15,045.64
- Chase (4.99% for life): $7,127.19
- Car loan (0%): $28,386.54
- Mortgage (4.125%): $430,158.00
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