power of a budget

[thestrongprofessional]

Congratulations on your accomplishments

I just came across this thread but want to echo the sentiments of the group. Congratulations on becoming disciplined and focusing on paying down debt. The future looks bright for you guys.

Raphael

[jared521]

hi everyone, boy i haven't been on this page for awhile. and i do hope everyone has been well. i will offer an update to my progress. i will say rite away. that i haven't fallen off the band wagon. the last payment i made outside of my regular payments. was 710. to may heloc. and that was on 8/29/16. my wife had gotten a job offer for 10k more than she was making. so we started saving our money. because we had a rather large 401k loan. so we thought we would have to pay tax/pen. to the tune of 8200. we ended up taking out a personal loan for 22500. we only took a term of 36 months. just to get it paid quickly. well to bring us up to the currant time. we have saved 11k. and are going to make a payment on the car tomorrow in the amount of 10k. that will leave us with 1k in the bank if anything comes up. thanks for all your interest and help.

[snafu]

Thank you for the update. Please pass along congratulations to wife for new position which resulted in a major increase to family income. What was the impact on new net income September 2016 - April 2017? How did you chose to allocate that income differential?

I'm confused...Did you elect to take retirement monies as income paying resultant income tax and penalties? Was $ 8,200. loan repaid to 401K? New Personal loan $ 22,500. leads me to ask if you are deeper in debt. I'm hopeful those old debts were cleared and you've continued to give every dollar a job.

[jared521]

Thank you for the update. Please pass along congratulations to wife for new position which resulted in a major increase to family income. What was the impact on new net income September 2016 - April 2017? How did you chose to allocate that income differential?

I'm confused...Did you elect to take retirement monies as income paying resultant income tax and penalties? Was $ 8,200. loan repaid to 401K? New Personal loan $ 22,500. leads me to ask if you are deeper in debt. I'm hopeful those old debts were cleared and you've continued to give every dollar a job.

thanks very much. to answer you questions. i hope i can answer them all. the new job resulted in a weekly increase of 200.00 a week. well she started on 12/5/16 but its a biweekly pay period. so it took about 3 weeks to get the first pay check. so what we do is our weekly budget is 1172.00x4 times a month. everything else goes into savings. and what ever bill we are working on gets it all except for 1k.so when we first started in aug of 2016 it was 6-700 a month. now it like 1000-1500 or more a month. ok, onto the second set of questions. when we started this whole process. we had a 22500.00 401k loan. but because of the job change we were going to have to claim is income. but elected to take out a personal loan.we only took out a term of 36 months for it. so no new debt. just moved it a little. we will start hitting that loan once the car is paid for. the new payoff for the car after our 10k payment today is 6325. which we should have payed off by june. i guess thats it. once again thanks for your interest in all of this. and thanks for everyones advice. till next time i shall remain hopefull

[sblatner]

Hi Jared,

Congratulations on all your progress! What you have done is a lot of hard work! I wanted to find out if you have heard of Dave Ramsey? You are following his plan. If not, you should check out his Facebook page - Dave Ramsey - Financial Peace. I think you could learn from reading other people's posts but also could provide a lot of advice. You are killing it and could help so many other people who don't know where to begin.

(FWIW, I don't agree with everything Dave has to say but his debt payoff really helps a lot of people...I am just finishing up hosting a Financial Peace University class. A gal is taking it...she just told me she used her tax refund to pay off debt instead of spending it on stuff and she found two small checks that she had forgotten about - she deposited them to her bank account and immediately turned around and made a payment on her credit card. Six months ago, she would have taken that money and gone out to dinner!)

[jared521]

thank you, and yes i do follow dave ramsey. and what a difference it has made in my life. this time last year i was paying our taxes with a credit card. we made an change in the taxes so we didnt owe. we will be getting back 200.00. we just did them yesterday. so far this year we have dug out of 13280.00 in debt. on top of our regular payments. really hoping its 20k by the start of august. that will be 1 year on the dr plan. and with the car paid for at that point. we should be able to hit 26k next year. although i am working on getting a part time job...

[disneysteve]

Wow Jared! That's fantastic.

[Gailete]

Terrific Jared! That is a long haul for sure. You are doing great and thanks for the update.

Nutria said>

Finally got them paid off after paying attention to where our money was actually going, getting disciplined and cutting out the waste.

Paying attention is so key. Last year was so rough for us financially that I had to pay attention better than I had been to spending and a lot of the usual and customary expenses we could not afford, so they went out of the budget. I have discovered over the last year that I lost around 10# which can also be a result of paying attention, as there wasn't money to go out to eat (fast food as I haven’t been in a ‘real’ restaurant in a very long time), I had to be more careful at the grocery etc. So just in that one area I was saving money and losing weight (and so did hubby!). So, sometimes in a quest for saving money, you get extra special results.

[commoncentsmike]

Congrats on the hard work. Once you've got that motivation aspect nailed down, the debt starts to fall pretty quickly. Not only that, but you'll probably avoid future debt pretty easily.