The Good Life on a Budget

• Posted by JvW on October 7th, 2008 filed in Debt, Uncategorized

Slide your eyes over to the right and check out my shiny new Debt-O-Meter! I found a tutorial on one of the sites in my Google Reader, Clever Dude, and spent 3 hours last night putting it together and tweaking it to my liking, with a little help from my computer engineering husband. Of course, the numbers still need a little tweaking…

For anyone out there who is a math geek like me, it’s pretty obvious that the “Total Bad Debt” amount that we have paid ($27,614.36) is smaller than the paid sum of the parts ($53,865.21). This is because one of our debts hasn’t been there since the beginning. I count the Total Bad Debt starting point to be when we were at the beginning of our debt payoff. It is our rock bottom. Since then, we have paid off huge chunks of debt, but we have also accumulated more debt. I don’t add any new debt into the Total Bad Debt Start, and I only count the net debt payoff towards the Total Bad Debt Payoff. So even though we have paid off about $30K of the credit cards, we have opened a new debt as well. Our debt was essentially redistributed, not eliminated.

The new debt would be Car Loan 2. No, it wasn’t necessary. Yes, it goes against everything Dave Ramsey has ever taught me. I will go into more details and rationalizations soon.