Debt Dumpers - 2019

So I am finally dealing with an old student loan of mine that has been in default for way too long (I know, I know).

We technically have enough to pay it off in full. Its 4400. It would make for a little tight 2 weeks. But we could do it. So here are my options

1. Pay it straight off. Be done with it. Lose a huge chunk of money, but it's a huge weight off my shoulders.
2. Rehabilitate my loan for $230 a month for 9 months, then pay $40/month till it's paid off. We have the money each month, it would come from our monthly budgeted CC payments each month. Use that big chunk to pay off 1/3 of our current CC debt.

Our two largest cards are currently interest free until 12/19 (4200) and 5/20 (6400). Our budget is made through the end of the year and our budgeted CC payments currently outpace our total CC debt so it would pay off our current balances and pay for the rest of our Disney trip as long as we don't add to our debt. We've been doing really well to not add more than $100 a month to our debt by cutting our spending significantly. But I am struggling by not seeing quick progress (just the way my brain works). Making a $4400 on our CC balances would feel good. But I feel like it would be smarter to just pay the student loan straight off.

Would there be any credit score advantage to rehabilitating rather than paying it off while it's in default? A better credit score could then save you money on things like insurance rates.
 
With that info I think my vote would still be use it to pay off the student loan, especially since you have a plan to pay off the CC debt by the end of the year. No interest is better than low interest. :)

Thank you for the input. I figure that would probably be the popular opinion/advice. Sometimes it's just hard getting my head to go in that direction. We make about $500-600 dent in the CC debt each check but it feels small and the difference is hard to see in the small term and that feels frustrating to me sometimes. I like seeing big progress.


Would there be any credit score advantage to rehabilitating rather than paying it off while it's in default? A better credit score could then save you money on things like insurance rates.

I'm rocking between 700-720 currently with no current plans to switch anything/finance anything new/purchase anything new at this time, so not really on my radar no. Home buying is not in the cards until we've dumped all this CC debt, and I'm sure having this student loan done and cleared for while will look nice on it too.
 
@Shughart I totally get wanting to see the number move down quicker! What helps me is seeing the "grand total" of all debts going down. No matter what you decide to use it for it'll be nice knowing that you knocked out a huge chunk of debt!
 
@Shughart I totally get wanting to see the number move down quicker! What helps me is seeing the "grand total" of all debts going down. No matter what you decide to use it for it'll be nice knowing that you knocked out a huge chunk of debt!
That's where I made mistakes this year, forgetting to look at the "grand total" going down. Now, I will stick to the snowball instead of fiddling.
 


That's where I made mistakes this year, forgetting to look at the "grand total" going down. Now, I will stick to the snowball instead of fiddling.

That feels like what I'm trying to do, fiddling. Fiddling to make myself feel better.
 
So I am finally dealing with an old student loan of mine that has been in default for way too long (I know, I know).

We technically have enough to pay it off in full. Its 4400. It would make for a little tight 2 weeks. But we could do it. So here are my options

1. Pay it straight off. Be done with it. Lose a huge chunk of money, but it's a huge weight off my shoulders.
2. Rehabilitate my loan for $230 a month for 9 months, then pay $40/month till it's paid off. We have the money each month, it would come from our monthly budgeted CC payments each month. Use that big chunk to pay off 1/3 of our current CC debt.

Our two largest cards are currently interest free until 12/19 (4200) and 5/20 (6400). Our budget is made through the end of the year and our budgeted CC payments currently outpace our total CC debt so it would pay off our current balances and pay for the rest of our Disney trip as long as we don't add to our debt. We've been doing really well to not add more than $100 a month to our debt by cutting our spending significantly. But I am struggling by not seeing quick progress (just the way my brain works). Making a $4400 on our CC balances would feel good. But I feel like it would be smarter to just pay the student loan straight off.
If it were mine and without knowing all the details, just the $4400 number, I'd just work on paying it and not doing the rehab. But, maybe I wouldn't pay it off immediately if it meant tight for a couple weeks. I might spread it over two months, but again that's not knowing all the details, just that I hate being tight in the budget and prefer just a little room.
 


That feels like what I'm trying to do, fiddling. Fiddling to make myself feel better.
When I did that, I didn't get cards paid off. Fiddled with "paying them all down" and ended up paying none off. With the new snowball, I will stick to the payments on the sheet and pay accordingly. I'm over the moon to have two cleared off by the end of the month. One of those will be our emergency card until the CC debt is zero.

Looks like the drama with the inheritance is finally coming to an end. I offered to help the cousin with paperwork. Turns out another family member was "being helpful" and submitting duplicate papers to the IRS and jamming up the process...for 5 months. Yesterday, the paperwork she needed arrived. Today she's going to the bank, then asking the last family member (the helpful one) to sign off on the trust bank account so that she can get funds distributed. I don't envy my cousin. She has been judged as not doing anything for months. I was guilty of it until I asked if I could help. I'm happy she will be out of the crosshairs soon. DH suggested that we use all the funds toward debt. Seeing as how we'd never planned on any money, I think I'll pull 1/4 aside for savings and do that. Geez...we may CC debt free by December even if it's only a few thousand.

Long morning already. My pet chicken died. She was my lil' baby and would come to me and hop into my hands. And we've scheduled our nearly 15-year-old dog to go in tomorrow. She can't get up and stopped eating yesterday, so it's time. And I won't let her suffer. Someone dumped her into our yard as a puppy and Daisy has been a great dog since then. Needless to say, I've decided that WDW ride music or land music is the way to go for me today at work.
 
I'm so sorry for your loss and upcoming loss @imbatman. It's never easy having to say goodbye to a beloved pet, especially 2 within a few days of each other. :hug:
 
Long morning already. My pet chicken died. She was my lil' baby and would come to me and hop into my hands. And we've scheduled our nearly 15-year-old dog to go in tomorrow. She can't get up and stopped eating yesterday, so it's time. And I won't let her suffer. Someone dumped her into our yard as a puppy and Daisy has been a great dog since then. Needless to say, I've decided that WDW ride music or land music is the way to go for me today at work.
Sorry about that for the chicken and the dog! It's tough to let go. Fifteen years is a really long time.
 
Long morning already. My pet chicken died. She was my lil' baby and would come to me and hop into my hands. And we've scheduled our nearly 15-year-old dog to go in tomorrow. She can't get up and stopped eating yesterday, so it's time. And I won't let her suffer. Someone dumped her into our yard as a puppy and Daisy has been a great dog since then. Needless to say, I've decided that WDW ride music or land music is the way to go for me today at work.

So sorry to hear about your chicken and your dog. Definitely a WDW music day for sure.
 
to me and hop into my hands. And we've scheduled our nearly 15-year-old dog to go in tomorrow. She can't get up and stopped eating yesterday, so it's time. And I won't let her suffer. Someone dumped her into our yard as a puppy and Daisy has been a great dog since then. Needless to say, I've decided that WDW

That's awful, I'm sorry :(:(
 
I paid off our Care Credit card yesterday! :cool1::banana: Feels extra good as May was a bad month for us, between illnesses and lots of unexpected car repairs. Still have 4 more cards to pay off and our car. Should get 2 more cards done this year, with the other 2 and car by mid-to-late 2020.

On less than happy front, my DH is getting really frustrated at work. They put in a freeze on raises a week after his yearly review this year so no raise still, and his department is supposed to be 2 people and it's been only him for almost half the year already. His co-worker quit after Christmas last year and it took a few weeks to find a replacement. The replacement was a joke, she could hardly even use a computer, and took 2 months to complete training for an aspect of the job that normally takes one week to master. She was finally let go after 3 months as she still couldn't do the job without constant supervision to correct her mistakes and answer her questions, and it was 2.5 months later than she should have gone. It took his boss 2 months to find another replacement, who finally started last week. This one seems to be working out, but his boss is having personal problems that she is taking out on him and the rest of his office. She is a nice person overall, but carries her personal issues into the office always, and it's been worse lately as her boyfriend is having major health issues and has been hospitalized off and on for over a month now. I feel for her, but she will yell at my DH for not doing things that aren't his job, or for not doing them in an order that is different than what their procedures say to do, or yell at him for something and then come back and apologize as she misinterpreted things and he was right in what he did. He is constantly stressed that he will do something correctly but she will still yell at him for it for no reason. And he never knows what to expect, some days she will be happy and friendly, the next she will just scream at everyone all day for no real reasons and some days she goes back and forth. Today he is helping at another office within the company who are short staffed due to everyone doing his position left and he is enjoying it so much more. He is considering asking to be transferred there, which would be doubly good as they are actually closer to where we live now in addition to him getting away from his supervisor. But he isn't sure, he doesn't want to ask and not get the transfer and have his supervisor find out and get upset with him.
 
My goals are to pay off credit cards (2), pay off car, and add to savings. I thought this would be the year I saved ... jokes on me. I ended up being out of work for six weeks for surgery... unexpectedly. This on top of having a trip scheduled for July and my kiddo going to a camp at Georgia Tech for engineering. An opportunity that I am proud to send him on! My hubs got a job which will help tremendously... he was previously the stay at home dad.
 
@ruadisneyfan2 - hope you and family are doing okay.


Thank you!
We are hanging in there. It's been rough for all of us but esp my dad. He is lost without his better half of close to 60 years if you include the time they dated. I made him a photo slideshow to music. It starts with her senior prom picture with him. It was 5 songs long and he watched it several times per day. I originally held back some photos because so many were vacation pics with dh and our kids. I wanted it to be balanced with my siblings and nieces too, not all about us. (Though really, it's their own fault they never bothered to travel with our parents. I have a zillion awesome memories with both of them and my kids, so I have zero regrets!)

He told me watching my movie is how he visits her now. :sad::sad:
So I made a longer version with 3 more songs and put in almost ALL the pictures I could find of my mom, even them in bathing suits. :laughing: It really turned out beautiful and now I wish I made it while she was still alive; she would have loved it.

I decided we could use some fun time/relax time so we're taking a long weekend in July and visiting Siesta Key, FL. We'll be a very short walk to the pool and only a block to the beach. :beach:
I invited my dad hoping some sunshine and beach would do him good but he declined. I'll try one more time in a few weeks but I can't push him.

Also dh and I are currently booked for a 5-nt sailing on the Magic in Nov which we booked about a year ago but it sails over my mom's birthday and I feel bad now to be away at that time. I don't know if all my family would want to get together then or what. We did that for my grandmother's birthday after she died but it would have been her 100th birthday.
I know my mom would tell me to cruise any chance I got but the guilt is there so I'm holding off making more plans for that, flights, etc. I have until late Aug to decide.

So original plan before my mom got sick was to pay off this car loan by Christmas, or shortly after. It's only around $10k and would be doable if we didn't travel before then. Between funeral flowers, suits for the kids, etc. I kind of put the car paydown idea on hold. More recently, I've been saving up for the Siesta Key trip and now I'm working on the cruise. We owe around $1800 on it. If we don't cruise, I can always plunk it down on the car loan. November isn't my favorite time to cruise but it's an unusual sailing: From San Juan to St. Kitts, Tortola, Castaway Cay then disembark in Miami. Because we booked so early and with the onboard booking discount, we got a great deal and it's gone up almost $1000 since we booked.

Also for the past few years, I've been saving up around $5000 every summer to put in our Christmas fund. I'll start that after I fund the cruise but I'm lowering it to $4000. There was usually $1000 leftover each year anyway. That should be funded by the end of Sept and then I can start working on the car loan. Even with both trips, it could still be paid down by late winter. All I can do is just keep swimming. ;)
 
Well, we rebooked our cruise for next spring from the Caribbean to Europe because we are hoping that I will be pregnant and I don't want to worry about Zika virus. There was a $300 change fee and DH requested that I book a suite instead of an oceanview balcony. Overall, it will cost $1400 more than our original cruise plans, but I am honestly more excited about this trip. The cruise leaves from Barcelona and goes to Nice, Portofino, Florence, Rome, Naples and then back to Barcelona. The amazing thing is that I got airfare for just $400 per person, which might actually be cheaper than airfare would have cost us to Orlando. Now to start figuring out what we want to do at each port with a 2-year-old.
This is a wonderful cruise! We did this sailing in 2013. :lovestruc:cloud9: If you're looking for a hotel in Barcelona, we stayed at the Hispanos 7 Suiza for 2 nights before sailing. Plenty of room for our family of 4 (our boys were 13 and 17 then) and it's a short walk to Sagrada Familia. We used Barcelona Day Tours for our airport transfers and a 4-hour tour of Barcelona the day before sailing.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_R...ews-Hispanos_7_Suiza-Barcelona_Catalonia.htmlhttps://www.tripadvisor.com/Attract...-Barcelona_Day_Tours-Barcelona_Catalonia.html
Awesome airfares! It was $1200 pp when we did it. Luckily, I had lot of USAirways miles so 3 of us flew free and I only had to buy 1 seat.

Have fun planning!
 
Thank you!
We are hanging in there. It's been rough for all of us but esp my dad. He is lost without his better half of close to 60 years if you include the time they dated. I made him a photo slideshow to music. It starts with her senior prom picture with him. It was 5 songs long and he watched it several times per day. I originally held back some photos because so many were vacation pics with dh and our kids. I wanted it to be balanced with my siblings and nieces too, not all about us. (Though really, it's their own fault they never bothered to travel with our parents. I have a zillion awesome memories with both of them and my kids, so I have zero regrets!)

He told me watching my movie is how he visits her now. :sad::sad:
So I made a longer version with 3 more songs and put in almost ALL the pictures I could find of my mom, even them in bathing suits. :laughing: It really turned out beautiful and now I wish I made it while she was still alive; she would have loved it.

I decided we could use some fun time/relax time so we're taking a long weekend in July and visiting Siesta Key, FL. We'll be a very short walk to the pool and only a block to the beach. :beach:
I invited my dad hoping some sunshine and beach would do him good but he declined. I'll try one more time in a few weeks but I can't push him.

Also dh and I are currently booked for a 5-nt sailing on the Magic in Nov which we booked about a year ago but it sails over my mom's birthday and I feel bad now to be away at that time. I don't know if all my family would want to get together then or what. We did that for my grandmother's birthday after she died but it would have been her 100th birthday.
I know my mom would tell me to cruise any chance I got but the guilt is there so I'm holding off making more plans for that, flights, etc. I have until late Aug to decide.

So original plan before my mom got sick was to pay off this car loan by Christmas, or shortly after. It's only around $10k and would be doable if we didn't travel before then. Between funeral flowers, suits for the kids, etc. I kind of put the car paydown idea on hold. More recently, I've been saving up for the Siesta Key trip and now I'm working on the cruise. We owe around $1800 on it. If we don't cruise, I can always plunk it down on the car loan. November isn't my favorite time to cruise but it's an unusual sailing: From San Juan to St. Kitts, Tortola, Castaway Cay then disembark in Miami. Because we booked so early and with the onboard booking discount, we got a great deal and it's gone up almost $1000 since we booked.

Also for the past few years, I've been saving up around $5000 every summer to put in our Christmas fund. I'll start that after I fund the cruise but I'm lowering it to $4000. There was usually $1000 leftover each year anyway. That should be funded by the end of Sept and then I can start working on the car loan. Even with both trips, it could still be paid down by late winter. All I can do is just keep swimming. ;)
That's a sweet idea for a photo slideshow and a good way to save memories. I've sailed on Magic twice out of Galveston on 7 day cruises when it was on that schedule, it's a very nice ship. It may be hard over her birthday, but it may also be a good place to spend the time looking over the blue water, the ocean does that for me anyway.
 

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