Starting Fresh Blogs

So the move may be moved up from November to September because the manager where I want to transfer to wants to help pay to move me up sooner than expected. However, they are unsure if they can fully help pay for the move to get me, and my family, up there when they want me to start. That being said, I need to start a savings plan so that I have some kind of money put to the side if we need to pay for everything ourselves.

That being said, here is the plan! My car is almost paid off completely. I believe I have about $550 to pay off. If I put the remainder of the auto loan onto my Capital One card, I can just finish off the loan and also get reward points on the credit card. And then instead of continuing to pay $304 per month on the car for a couple of months, I can spread out that money amongst my credit cards.

Currently paying $200/month towards my Apple Card, $100/month towards my Chase Card, and I was paying $100/month towards my BestBuy Card, but I finished paying off the BestBuy Card. So now it will be $100/month towards the Capital One Card. However, now that I will have an extra $300/month to play around with. It will probably look more like this until either the Capital One or Chase Card get paid off and then it will change again.

As we speak, my Apple card has a balance of $6,970 to be paid, my Capital One card has a balance of $640 to be paid (before adding the $550 from the auto loan), and my Chase card has $718 to be paid.

So now that I am going to have an extra $300 to play with to put down on credit cards. What I can do is just pick a card and knock it out quickly so that I can take the money and move it onto the next card and pay it off. Kind of like I was talking about in my “Snowballing Debts” blog post. So I can spread the extra money and pay all 3 debts off a little quicker together or I can knock them out quicker one at a time. So I was thinking, that after I pay off the auto loan with my Capital One card, that will bring the balance to about $1,200. Meaning I can go from lowest balance to highest balance.

1. Chase credit card $720
2. Capital One credit card $1,200
3. Apple credit card $7,000

Just to make the numbers look about even. I am looking at about $8,900 in credit card debt that I plan to really start knocking out over the next year. And my plan is to take the $300 and only take that amount to the next debt. Meaning, that because I would go from paying $100/month to $400/month on the Chase card, I would take the $300 and move that instead of the $400 onto the next card. So I would take the extra $100 and move it into a savings account that doesn’t really exist at the moment.

And then I would knock out the Capital One card debt and then I would be putting $200/month into savings and paying $500/month onto the Apple card until that gets paid off. Unless I have a really good month at work or there is some extra money leftover from the month and I can just throw it at the debt until it is paid off.

Either way, I want to be able to knock out my debt as quickly as possible so that I can start my true savings journey.

On top of this decision, my wife and I have decided that we need to change our eating habits so that we can start budgeting correctly and save some sort of money. With a proper budget, we can see what we don’t really need and can cut out some expenses to save more money.

She too has credit card debt, but she decided she wanted to tackle that on her own.

We also agreed that we would do family DoorDashing to bring in some extra income between now and the move. This will help take out credit card debt on her side and we can then take the extra to put into savings for the move in case we need to get things right before we move or right after we move.

I also thought about setting up an automatic weekly transfer of $20-30 from my checking account into a savings account. It may not be a lot but over time it will become something. Once a month, I move $2,100 into a separate account to hold the money for rent. Although I know that rent is never that amount, I leave the excess money in that account as a “secondary savings” kind of thing. I started doing that a few months ago, so there is almost nothing in there. Maybe $35 left over right now.

I recently started using the Acorns investing app. Where it takes your bank account and rounds up to the next $1 for each charge and then every time the round ups get to $5 it will take it out of your bank account and invest the $5 or so that got rounded up and invest the money in a few different sections of the market. So I am trying to spread my money around as best as I can.