Reply to Help me spend my car payment!

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "Help me spend my car payment!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thanks all for the advice. To clarify, I am not saving for college. Our HHI is roughly 200K. But moving upwards shortly, fingers crossed.

Is my spouse onboard with budgeting? Let me put it this way, I'm the saver in the family friends, married to the spender.

It's an uphill battle for sure when there are external forces often not entirely in one's control. [/quote]

You need to put your spouse on a monthly budget.  No credit cards.  He gets $X cash each month to do with as he wants.  He can save it for the following month or spend it.  When it's gone, it's gone and he has to wait until next month for extra spending money.  If he buys lunch and he doesn't have money for tomorrow's lunch, he can brown bag it.  You also need to budget how much to spend on food and assorted expenses per month.  With your income, that can be a little more generous than beans and rice for every meal, but don't go overboard.  Eating out gets budgeted with groceries for the monthly food budget.

You need to map out how much you are paying down and get a schedule for when the CC debt will be gone.  At $200K HHI, that's ridiculous to have that amount of debt unless you had an emergency like a health emergency or home disaster not covered by insurance.

At $200K, you should be taking home about $11K per month.  Budgeting about $5K for mortgage, insurance, utilities, you have a fairly big amount to work with.  Even with the $2400 that you currently budget for daycare and diapers, that leaves you with $3K+.  $1500 should be easily feasible unless you have some other major expense that you haven't mentioned.  At $1500, you should be able to pay off the debt in around 2 years.    If you want to be more aggressive, you can budget $2K per month and be done in closer to 18 months.  And this is only an estimate, but you need to be much more serious about getting that debt off your shoulders.  You don't even realize how much money you are bleeding away in interest on those high-interest debts.  You are paying about $3300 a year in interest fees, so close to $300 in interest a month.  Your car loan was costing you much less than this in interest.  That extra $300-400 applied to these loans could have save you several hundred dollars a year compounded.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics