Debt Repayment: Round 2
Go hard or go home.
In high school, the football locker room had that painted on the the wall just above the door in huge royal blue letters.
The track team, of which I was a member, used the same locker room in the Spring (though we still called it the football locker room).
We always thought the saying was a little goofy as every one of us distance runners would have much preferred to “go home” over running 5-10 miles after school, you know, “for fun”.
Must be a football thing…
Anyway, I know it’s supposed to be a big motivational thing so I’m gonna use it here as one of those sports cliches — except for paying down debt.
Back in my “in the red” days, I was somehow able to scrounge together roughly $2000 per month to put towards debt repayment. Even during my anti-PMI campaign, I was tossing nearly $1000 extra towards my mortage each month too.
Yeah, I went big.
Balances fell faster than I’d ever thought possible and I managed to stick with it (or stay motivated) long enough to get myself in the black.
How’d I do it?
Not sure.
I’m still in awe of how much money I was able to come up with during that time to pay down the debt.
I do know, though, how I was able to stay on track.
I had a HUGE chart that I updated each and every day to keep on top of my progress. Keeping such close track (and not wanting to wait months to make updates) lead me to start making weekly payments on things. Weekly payments led to balances falling rapidly. Rapidly falling balances led to more updates needed on the chart.
Dare I say it, It was almost fun to keep track of my debt reduction since there were so many opportunities to make updates.
Well, I’m back in the red again — and without much of a game plan — so guess what I’m doing?
Yep, resurrecting “the chart”.
I’m still trying to find the old beast in my archives so I can copy it exactly — and then improve on it — but I plan to get it back up and running and to get the carefully orchestrated weekly payments started up before the end of the weekend.
I’m shootin’ for $2500 payments per month in 2011… Even with another smurfling on the way in April, I think I can be in the black by December.
We’ll see…
This’ll be my financial goal for 2011.
