My Debt

Uh…

*nervous laughter*

Perhaps I’m in denial?

I feel guilty that I haven’t mentioned my debt yet, when I’ve been talking about all this spending and saving. So here goes…

Hi. My name is PKThunder, and I have about $19,000 of debt.

I feel better now. I think the reason that I hadn’t mentioned it already is because it’s not terribly stress-inducing debt. It’s either good debt in the form of a student loan, or “stable” debt in the form of a monthly car payment, or it’s business debt, offset by the pile of inventory in my home office. But it’s still debt, and here are the details:

Business credit card: $2,284
Car Loan: $11,893
Student Loan: $3,378
Family member Loan: $1,485
Total: $19,041

So what’s my plan? Well, my dream is to be debt-free by my 30^th birthday (less than three years away). There is a good possibility that it happens sooner. It depends on how much more important I place starting a Roth IRA and saving for a down payment on a home.

In the meantime, there is the wedding. I’ve decided to pay just my regular monthly payments on these loans until after the wedding, with the exception of the loan from my dad, but that’s just an additional $12 a month to make it a more “round” number.

I feel like I should be doing more with the debt, but as the wedding date approaches, I know there will be more and more things I’ll need to pay for and I don’t want additional debt because of it.

When March comes, it will be full-speed ahead! Because the non-credit card loans are within .05% of each other, I’ve decided to do the smallest-balance-first snowball method. The business credit card will be handled separately, of course, and I will be making payments on that as I make sales/profits. Then once my inventory is paid off, I can start paying myself!

Writing this out makes me feel better about my plan and my reasons for waiting to accelerate the debt reduction. For now I must keep my spending low, and any money still left in my savings account after the wedding will be proof that I’ve been doing a good job.