PocketCoinage

You tune into the news one evening to discover that a hurricane has the potential to make landfall.  They said it could happen in about twenty days.  What do you do?  Do you deny the possibility and keep living your life, or do you start to prepare now?  You start to prepare.

This is exactly what I am doing right now.  Recently at work, there have been talks of layoffs if the finances do not improve.  I’ve heard this through the grapevine over the past three months, but nothing in writing to confirm the rumor.  This, however, changed in the past week; upper management put it in writing.  Because of this, I am officially stopping my debt snowball until the storm passes.  I should find out if they will proceed with the layoffs by next month.  Just to be safe, I’m looking to put it all on hold for the first quarter of 2011.  If things still look cloudy, I’ll continue to stock pile money.  Once things get better, I will toss all that I saved onto my debt and resume the snowball.

I’m going on a strict, written budget for the next couple of months.  I’ll keep you posted.

It’s been almost two months since my last posting and I’m sure many of you are wondering where I’ve been.

Well, I’ve been killing my student loan debt.  Just this past week I paid off one of my loans and have two more to go.  If you look in the right-hand column of my blog, you will see my countdown.  The $700 is what I calculated the average monthly payment to be.  However, in the last two months alone, I’ve been putting my payments into overdrive.

I’ve been sacrificing by cutting back my lifestyle, selling things, and budgeting to become debt free sooner.  Guess what?  It’s working! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  In the past three months alone I was able to allocate almost $4,000 towards my loans!  The feeling is incredible.  Before I got fired up, I was on course to pay them all off in 4.5 years.  I never thought I would pay my student loans off in a year or less.  Now I’m on target for Summer/Fall of 2011!

The key is staying motivated, having a plan, and staying focused on one goal; not a few.  I think that was my main problem.  Now with the one goal in the crosshairs, I can take it on!