Here is an update on our second of 5 financial goals for 2008. The following is a recap of this goal:

2.) Pay Down 20% Of Our Non-Mortgage Debt
This is a pretty ambitious goal but I think we can do it. After the wedding and home purchase though we have quite a few assets our debt has been steadily increasing. I would like to get this completely eliminated within 3 years, and 20% will be a great start. Most of this debt is at 0% or other reasonable rates so that is why I am not overly worried about paying it all off before all else.

Starting Point

We started this year at a rather staggering sounding $148,240.40. The majority of this debt however is my wife’s student loan debt which is at a fairly low interest rate (3.85%) as well as on some 0% credit cards that have been lingering for a while.

Progress

So far this year the debt has been reduced to $133,463.69, which is a 9.97% decrease. The chart below illustrates the decrease so far:

Needless to say I am pretty pleased with the progress on this goal. I thought it was going to be ambitious when we started the year, but we were able to buckle down and cut a lot of extraneous items out of our budget. We were also helped by a rather sizable tax return which mostly went towards this.

I’m not expecting to be able to continue at this pace the rest of the year, but 20% is definitely in sight and I am thinking the goal should be upped to 25%.

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