Following up on my earlier posts about needing a new credit card (I presently don't have any credit cards). I've gone with Capital One design your own card. I have some concerns about Capital One, lots of bad stuff out there, but I haven't had good service from Citi or BOA either so I'm going to give CO a try. I won't be using this credit card for day to day expenses but only for a couple of small monthly bills that I prefer get charged to a credit card and I'll use it for business travel (right now I'm using my debit card which works fine but I don't like using my money for biz travel).

Here are our numbers as of 11/30: we have $5,662 in debt left to pay. We have paid off $49,875 or 89% of our debt. We have also paid in full 7 of our 8 debts and paid 79% of the last debt.

We've got 4 weeks left to go in 2007 and, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I don't think we are going to close out our debt by the end of the year. We do have money in our emergency fund that we could put towards our debt if we don't make it. Would you do that, raid the emergency fund to pay off the remaining debt or let the debt roll into to early January?

Of course, the smart answer is to let it roll over. I think discipline is important in any case. That said, I'm not sure I could resist.

I've been working on our 2008 yearly budget and figured out I made an $8400 error on the 2007 budget. I deducted $8400 in rental income from one of our investment properties' total costs but then also added the $8400 back in as income (counted it twice). So, the fact that we are $2100 behind on our debt paydown project makes sense since I was $8400 off on our yearly budget.

Oops!

A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I were up north visiting my grandparents (who live in a summer resort area). We were doing a bit of window shopping in one of the cute small towns. Since its a summer resort area and we were visiting in Dec. there were a ton of super duper sales (50%-75%) in a lot of very high end posh shops. I went into one of my favorite shops (this is an area where I spent my summers when I was a kid and where we plan to retire and visit 2 or 3 times a year) thinking I would partake in some 75% off items. There was a group of women, about my age, who were squealing with delight when I walked in the shop (husband was next door looking at beer/wine) and I just found myself kinda disgusted with these women (and I guess with myself) that shopping could bring out such noises. I spent about 5 minutes in the shop and then I had to leave.

My husband was so surprised when I found him 5 minutes later reviewing the micro-brews next store. He gave me a look and I said those ladies scared me..... and he said last year you would have been one of those ladies (screaming about sales). He is correct, a year ago I would have walked out of that shop with $500 in clothes. I did spend about $50 picking up some super sale items that I will give as Christmas gifts. Husband and I also spent about $55 on an item for our home. True to our new habits we did not buy the item when we first looked at it, but thought about it and went back a couple of days later to confirm that we really wanted it.

I'm not surprised that I didn't spend the money (I've gotten really good at that) but I am surprised that I didn't have any desire to spend the money.

So I listened to our home telephone answering machine this morning. We normally listen to the msgs. about 1 a week b/c people who know us know to call us at work or on our cell phones. We had 4 messages from a debt collection company. The messages were automated did not indicate who the company was trying to reach or give any type of account number. I was a little annoyed by the messages thinking about how hard we have worked on our debt and wondering if we missed something, etc. When I got to work I called the number and sat on hold for about 20 minutes. When I got through to a live person I, very nicely, explained that we had some messages on our home telephone asking us to call. I asked for the CR's name which she gave it to me and then I asked whether she had an ID number and she said "why would you need that!" She asked me for our home phone number, which I gave to her, and then asked whether we knew a James Doe (leaving the last name off). I said we did not and then she hung up on me without giving me any type of explanation. I called back, sat on hold for another 20 minutes, and when through the same process this time the rep asked me whether we knew a Frank Doe (leaving the last name off). I said we did not, but explained that the first rep had asked about another name. The second rep couldn't explain the first rep or the switch in names but she said she would disassociate our number from the debt. We'll see if that works.

Here are our numbers as of 12/7: we have $5,565 in debt left to pay. We have paid off $49,972 or 90% of our debt. We have also paid in full 7 of our 8 debts and paid 80% of the last debt. We are down to the the last 10% of our debt and $50,000 paid is right around the corner, but its slow going in December....

Okay, I've decided against raiding the emergency account. But, I have raided the new car fund and I've decided to transfer $750 from my nused car ING account to our joint account to put towards debt. $750 will get us under $5000 in debt and past the $50,000 mark.

I just re-read most of my Fiscal Fitness posts to help me stay on track. I feel like the last $5500 in debt is like the last 10 lbs. of diet weight..... hard to get past!

Okay, 3rd post of the day. Can you tell I'm spending most of the day working on our finances??

I bought my FICO score and one credit report for $16 today. I normally pull my credit reports through the annual credit report site (free) but I wanted my official FICO score for my year end report (report to me and my husband) and for my 2008 planning (nused car). I was interested to see how my debt paydown project impacted (or did not impact my score) and thought my score probably dropped since I closed any and all credit card accounts over the last year but also recently applied for a new credit card (new credit can also drop a score). I am happy to report that my FICO score is 804 and I am considered extremely low risk for defaults. Only 13% of the population has a FICO score above 800. There were no errors on my credit report and it was super cool to have only 2 accounts with balances (both mortgages, one joint mortgage with my husband for our primary home and one individual mortgage for one of our investment properties, I also have another mortgage that does not show up on my credit report b/c its privately held).

So bottom line, debt paydown project has increased my FICO score. Hooray!

Cool, that's good news.

Yesterday, I made my first purchases with my new Capital One credit card. Although I use my debit card all the time, swiping a credit card felt different. The last time I used a credit card to make a purchase was 12/31/06.

As discussed in prior posts, I obtained a new credit card to use for business travel. Yesterday I used the credit card for a rental car and gas for the rental car on a business trip. Although the charges were less than $100 it was nice to not have the money come right out of my checking account.

I plan to keep the credit card in my desk at work.

Here are our numbers as of 12/11: we have $5,069 in debt left to pay. We have paid off $50,468 or 91% of our debt. Hooray for breaking $50,000!!

We are presently @ $2900 behind on our debt paydown project.

That is awesome. You're in the home stretch now!

It's cool seeing the number in your post title getting smaller and smaller...

Here are our numbers as of 12/13: we have $4,720 in debt left to pay. We have paid off $50,817 or 92% of our debt. Hooray for below $5,000!!

We are presently $2,584 behind on our debt paydown project.

That's excellent. Hooray for below $5K. I'm so looking forward to when you have no debt left at all.

If you use Quicken or Excel to keep track of all this, it might be inspiring to post a graph that shows your progress -- you're doing an impressive job and sometimes a picture tells the story even more dramatically.

Something like this, which is one I did from Quicken a while back when I finally got rid of my own debt (the blue bars at the bottom)