One Down One To Go!

Just wanted to report that as soon as the payments hit Donna and I will have paid off the Chase credit card! We've paid off over $10,000 in 4 months! Up next is her student loan and we plan to knock it out with the same intensity that we knocked out the Chase credit card.

Just to recap in Sep 2011 we opened a Chase account and transferred our credit card debt to a 0% APR for one year account. We knew that having a year to pay it off would force us to pay it off within the year so that we didn't get hit with interest. In January we both read Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover and even though this debt was higher than her student loan and it was interest free compared to 6.8% interest we decided to pay this one off first because we knew we had to have it paid before October 2012. Little did we realize we'd end up paying it off in 4 months! I guess we did get gazelle intense though it really didn't seem like it.

I'll be the first to admit that we were able to knock out big chunks of it through the sale of camera gear and things like that but I'm fine with it. I sold a really nice camera that I wasn't shooting with enough to justify keeping it and as it turns out it looks like we'll be switching to different cameras soon so there's a good possibility I'll be selling all of my Canon gear and using that money to fund the new cameras that we'll get for Donna and me.

For me the coolest part about the whole deal, other than paying off the card, is that we made the last two payments on my birthday. What a great present that was!

4 April 2012 Update: I logged into the Chase account this morning and the payments have been applied. Chase has been paid in full! Time to write them and have the account closed. Below is a screen capture of the account summary page.

All You Have to do is Ask!

"The answer is always no if you don't ask" -- quote from Dave Ramsey from his Podcast

I think I've stumbled onto something with this whole asking thing. In past couple of weeks asking has put over $1400 either into my bank account or will be saved over the next six months. I previously wrote about How one call saved us $180. In this post I want to tell you about two other times I asked and the outcome.

The community where we live has a clubhouse that residents can use. Part of the club house is a fitness center and inside the fitness center is a weight machine. Previoulsy I had found out that an instructional DVD was available for the weight machine and I managed to get a copy of it. I somehow lost it and wanted to start using it again. (I'm a little slow on the whole get into shape new years resolution thing). I was going through my old emails and saw where I had contacted the manufacturer of the weight machine asking about the DVD. They had previoulsy offered to sell me one for $35 but I didn't want to pay that. I forwarded the old email and asked the guy if they happened to have any DVD's that were extra or that perhaps had a bad label or something that I could buy at at discount. The guy emailed back and asked for my shipping address. I supplied it and he sent me a brand new DVD free of charge. Cha Ching - just saved $35.00 + shipping.

Late last week I saw a post on Craigslist for a guy renting camera equipment here in our area. I emailed him asking if he was interesting in adding a camera to his rental inventory because I had one I wanted to sell. He said he wasn't but forwarded me an ad for a guy in a near by town that was looking for the exact camera I wanted to sell. I contacted the guy looking for the camera. We met. He bought the camera for my asking price plus an extra $100 worth of other camera goodies I had that were specific to that camera. Cha Ching - $1200.00. I gotta tell you it felt good holding 24 $50 bills in my hand. I got to hold them until we got to the bank and deposited them. When we got home I scheduled an extra payment on the bill we are concentrating on paying off as part of our debt snowball.

Three times I've asked and three times I have benefitted from asking. I'm telling you - if you're not asking then odds are you're costing yourself.

50 Cents

50 cents doesn't sound like much does it and it really isn't. Odds are you could come up with 50 cents in just a matter of seconds. No problem, piece of cake, right? So what if we came up with 50 cents per day what would that get you? Let's say you work 5 days a week and save 50 cents per day for those five days. On Friday you'll have $2.50 set aside. Let's assume each month has 4 weeks. At the end of the month you'll have $10.00 saved. Do that for 12 months and at the end of the year you'll have $120 saved. Now let's assume you're really committed and save 50 cents per day even on the days when you're not working. At the end of each week you'll have $3.50. Each month you'll save $14 and each year you'll save $168. I know $120 - $168 per year really isn't anything to get terribly excited about is it. For Donna and me those amounts would cover a good portion of our cell phone bill but still it honestly doesn't excite me too much.

I do get excited when I think about what that measly 50 cents per day can do for me as far as getting out of debt. Because Donna and I are so focused on getting rid of our debt right now we are looking for any and everything we can do to get our income up so that we'll have more money to pay on bills. Let's bring our friend Jack back for a moment. As a quick recap Jack is a fictional character with 3 outstanding debts: Lowe's credit card with $550 balance, $15 per month minimum payment, 18% interest, Student Loan of $6800, $100 minimum payment, 6.8% interest and Visa card with $2200 balance, $50.00 per month minimum payment, 12% interest. Using Dave Ramsey's Debt Snowball method Jack will be out of debt in April 2018 after paying $2685 in interest. Now let's take that $10.00 Jack saved each day at work and see what adding $10 towards his bills each month gets him. Jack will be out of debt in Oct 2017 after paying $2374.68 in interest. He'll save $399 interest payments and will be out of debt 1 year, 5 months sooner. Finally let's see what $14.00 per month extra does for Jack. Jack will be out of debt in Aug 2017 after paying $2281.32 in interest payments. He'll save $492 in interest payments and will be out of debt 1 year 7 months sooner.

So how can you manage to save 50 cents per day when it seems like every dollar you have is already spoken for? Here's a few ideas for you:

• Suppose you buy lunch 5 days a week. Bring your lunch one or two days per week. Assuming lunch costs $7.00 you've just saved two weeks worth.
• Buy a soda from the machine each day? Bring one instead. Our vending machines offer bottles for $1.25 and cans for 75 cents. Let's assume a 12-pack of soda cost $4.00. That works out to about 34 cents per soda. By not buying from the vending machine you'll save between 41 to 91 cents each time you skip the vending machine
• Skip the goodies in the other vending machine. Some example prices for items in our vending machine. Crunch and Munch Popcorn - 55 cents, Pork Skins (my favorite) - 65 cents, Checxmix - 85 cents, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups - $1.00. I'm not about to say you can't indulge in these things I'm just recommend you don't indulge in them as much as you normally would.
• Check the console/change holder in your car. I just checked mine and came up with $1.68
• Check your junk drawer in your desk. Just scored an additional $1.85 from mine
• Would you like to supersize that? Nope. Save that cost which I'm sure is more than 50 cents
• Coupons. Combine a couple and you'll have your 50 cents daily savings

50 cents per day isn't much but as you can see it can make a big difference. Good luck discovering ways to come up with your 50 cents each day. If you have a good idea please share it!

Turbocharging Your Debt Snowball

In the Baby Step 2 Paying off Debt using the Debt Snowball post I said that I would share ways that you can turbocharge your debt snowball to get your debt paid off as quickly as possible.

Let's recap Jack's situation. He has 3 outstanding debts:

1. Lowe's Credit Card, $550 balance, 18% APR, $15 per month minimum payment
2. Student Loan, $6800 balance, 6% APR, $100 per month minimum payment
3. Visa Credit Card, $2200 balance, 12% APR, 50 per month minimum payment

Using the debt snowball of paying off his bills in order from lowest balance to highest balance he'll first pay off the Lowe's Card, then Visa, then Student Loan. Using this approach Jack will be out of debt by February 2018. Can you believe that 6 years to pay off a total of $9550 + $2430.35 in interest. I don't know about you but that's unacceptable to me. Surely there's a way Jack can come up with some additional money to pay on his debts. Doing so will make a big, big difference as you'll see. Let's see what happens if Jack gets serious about paying off his debt and is able to apply an extra $5, $10, 15, $20, $25, $50, $75, $100 or even $200 per month extra towards his debt. How quickly can Jack get out of debt and move on to fully funding his emergency fund. The table below summaries each of these pay off options.

Jack's Payoff Strategies
Extra Amount	Pay Off Date	Total Interest Paid	Reduction in Payoff Time	Interest Saved
0	Feb 2018	2430.35	0	0
5	Nov 2017	2265.89	1 year 1 month	227
10	Aug 2017	2138.63	1 year 4 months	355
15	Jun 2017	2032.15	1 year 6 months	461
20	Apr 2017	1939.66	1 year 8 months	554
25	Feb 2017	1857.69	1 year 10 months	636
50	May 2016	1548.23	2 years 7 months	945
75	Nov 2015	1336.39	3 years 1 month	1157
100	Jun 2015	1179.41	3 years 6 months	1314
200	Jun 2014	811.92	4 years 6 months	1681

Let's take a look at the table and see what we can learn from it. We already know that using the debt snowball and paying off stuff in a specific order will get us out of debt faster than just paying minimums and not rolling the money over towards other debts. But look at the difference that an extra $5.00 per month makes. Isn't getting out of debt an entire year sooner worth $5.00 a month? Who couldn't manage to come up with 17 cents per day. As you can see an extra $5.00 is good and $10 gets better and so on. There are lots of ways to come up with some extra money for making additional payments on your debt. I'll share two of them that I'm using right now.

Selling Books on Half.com - If you're like me you may have a book case full of books that you've read once and oneday may read again, right? I was holding on to several books that fell into that category but these days with being able to read books on eReaders such as the Amazon Kindle Fire or the iPad or even your desktop/laptop computer hanging on to print books just didn't make a whole lot of sense. I decided to pull all books except those that I really, really wanted to keep and check to see what I might be able to sell them for on Half.com. I started typing in the ISBN for each book and in some cases I was disappointed to see that several people had the very same book listed for only 75 cents. When I saw a case like that I decided to put the book into the "donate to library" stack and moved on to the next one. As I was checking books I discovered that people can put in pre-orders on half.com. I don't know how long that feature has been in place but I decided to take advantage of it. The way it works is when you check the book and someone has placed a pre-order for it you'll get a notice that buyer XXX is willing to buy the book for $xx.00 and if you're willing to sell your book at that price you can sell it to that buyer right away without completing the listing process. To me that's a pretty cool feature. As it turned out I had 4 books that people had placed pre-orders for so I was able to sell 4 books instantly! I worked my way through the books and listed several and have sold two additional books so far. We also cleared out lots of space on the book shelf that we'll be turning into a big picture frame to hold pictures we want to print and frame. With very little effort I was able to make an extra $50 to pay towards our debt. As soon as Half pays me that's what I'll do with the money. Pay it towards debt.

Selling Stuff on eBay.com - Books have been written on how to get rich on eBay. I'm not here to tell you how to do that because I don't know how to do it :). I will tell you though that you can pick up some extra cash by selling stuff on eBay. While we were going through the books we found other stuff that had been sitting on the shelf for a long time. Since we weren't using it and didn't see us using it anytime soon we listed it on eBay. What I do when I list something on eBay is start it at 99 cents and no reserve. There are exceptions, of course, such as a high end camera lens I currently have listed. While I don't use it and am willing to sell it I'm not willing to give it away. The other stuff though, if I can get 99 cents for it I'd rather have that than the item taking up room in my house. Currently I have 9 items listed on eBay and as of the time I'm writing this 6 of them will sell for approximately $70.00. I expect this figure to go up before the auctions are over. I'll post a follow up and let you know how things actually turned out.

If you put you mind to it you can easily find extra money to help you get your debts knocked off. Hopefully this post will motivate you to find some extra cash. Good luck!