
The Official 2019 Debt Smackdown
Welcome to the Official* 2019 Debt Smackdown!
Happy new year everyone!
I know a few of use have been chomping at the bit to get going with 2019's debt - so with out further ado, I present this years spreadsheet! First of all, quick thanks to everyone on here who supported this last year, and helped make sure the Google Sheet remained in tip top shape.
So what's this about? If you are holding onto some debt as you enter 2019 - and would like to get rid of it - this challenge is for you.
To the participants from last year, welcome back! For some of us, our total debts are too large to smack down completely in one calendar year, so if you're here from last year, congratulations on your progress and let's keep on doing this! In 2018, we collectively paid down over $1,500,000 in debt! An increase of OVER $600,000 than in 2017!
For all new participants, we are happy to have you join in this year! New blood is always welcome. Let's all motivate each other to pay off those debts and continue moving forward to financial freedom.
Per last year, this is a shared one between the two forums/communities. Hopefully, that won't bring any problems! (Link to the Forum post [soon])
How it works:
1. List the amount of total debt that you owe.
This step is to give you an awareness of your current debt situation. Feel free to share, this forum is a safe and nonjudgmental place. You can also decide to keep this information private, you don't have to post your total here if you are not comfortable doing so.
2. Post in this thread the total amount of debt you would like to pay off during the 2019 calendar year. (This part is required.)
Feel free to break down the amounts by credit card/type of debt. Also, if you have a specific plan or some ideas on how you plan to pay down the debt, you can post that too. Maybe your plan will spark some ideas for others on how to tackle their own debts!
3. Check in monthly in this thread and report on how your debt smackdown is going. (This part is required.)
4. Post monthly on the 2019 Google Sheet to track your progress. (This part is required.)
Claim a line on the spreadsheet, and post your total debt to be paid off, and the monthly amount that you send off towards it. Some people track their total payments and don't account for interest, some people account for principal only. The method you choose is up to you!
If you come across this challenge later in the year, no worries, you can still jump right in. Just put zeroes in the months where you had not joined the challenge yet, and start in the month you join in.
Last year, we collectively paid off $1,500,000. Let's smash that number again in 2019!
Please let me know any issues with the sheet - sometimes things are a bit wonky when making new ones!
*Official in the sense that there's a spreadsheet. Not official in the sense that it's made by YNAB. I'm just following naming conventions here :)
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March check-in: $1645.73 sent to debt! Didn't quite reach our goal of $2500.00 this month. We had a side hustle end in March, plus the new puppy—so our snowball has shrunk.
We're 25% to our goal for the year. Sending extra dollars in January certainly helped get ahead! We're making some adjustments for April and will re-evaluate our goal at the end of the month. -
I feel a bit off track. Two major things happened. 1. I paid off my car which was the debt I've been focused on for quite some time and was excited about paying off. Now my next debts have quite a bit to go on them. 2. My boyfriend and I had a pretty messy break up. We lived together and now there are things that I will need to get and things that I will need to fix from where he took things that were attached to walls and such.
I'm emotionally a wreck and feel like I'm failing in this aspect as well since I was able to put so much toward debt so far this year and now I'm feeling more like I need to put a hold on it. Ugh! Any words of encouragement would be great!
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March Check-In (I think I missed February - oops!)
Starting Debt: $18,742.82
Current Debt: $13,445.35
Progress: $5,297.47 and 28.26% of debt goal paid
I'm not entirely convinced we're going to meet our goal by the end of the year. ManSpice didn't get as big a raise as anticipated, which is a bummer, but we are still consistently paying $1150 a month toward the debt, so we are at least being consistent. Spicelet will be done with private pre-K in May, so that will free up around $500 a month to go toward debt, but some of it will also need to go toward some true expenses (vet visits, travel, and please God, please - new floors).
Plugging along, no matter what, because being just shy of our year-end goal is way better progress than paying minimums.
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Hi everyone!
I've claimed row #253
I'm a bit late to the party, I wish I had found this forum when I started YNAB 2 years ago 😊 we started with $144,586.00 in total non mortgage debts, it still makes me feel so ashamed just thinking about that total.
I have the following non mortgage debts left
ANZ credit card $1,872.37
Westpac credit card $8,121.09
Citibank credit card $12,000.00
CBA Personal Loan $24,683.36
Total non mortgage debt $46,676.82
My plan is to snowball away the credit card debt of $21,993.46 this year!
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I've been using YNAB since December 2018, and I've already found more money in my budget than I thought possible. Windfalls this year enabled us to pay off 2 cars and a credit card.
My goal this year is to begin an aggressive snowball on the last debt, which is my mortgage. The first part of this year will be spent topping up some large pending expense categories (AC that's 20 years old and roof work), and the second half of the year will snowball that money into the mortgage.
The current debt amount is $65,153.66, and my goal is $5,000 in extra payments. This year is the beginning of the snowball, so the long term goal is to roll it into 2020 for 10k in extra payments.
I'm late to the show, so April will be the first month to update on later. If I've done this correctly (??), looks like I've got # 254.
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Hello everyone and sorry it's taken me so long to get here this year! There are big changes in my life right now. You can follow those in my journal, but for here I'll just put my goals, and actually start checking in:
Total debt as at 31 Dec 2019: $2961.60 made up of: Personal Loan $1765; and a not truly PIF CC with a rolling balance that keeps me from paying interest of $1196.60.
The goal (again) is to pay this off in full this year.
January progress:
CC $ 297.18; Loan $65; Total $362.18 = @ 12.23% of goal
February progress:
CC $662.10; Loan $65; Total $727.10 = @ 36.78% of goal
March progress:
CC $-160.10; Loan $55; Total $-105.10 = @ 33.23% of goal
Obviously going forward I'm hoping to reverse that negative trend from last month (and on track, I have today reconciled my "In the black" CC!) and make some serious headway on that personal loan. This year could see my "graduation" from the Debt Smackdown thread!
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Hi everyone! This is cool!
Debt totals (as of 3/31/19)
Personal loan: $34500
My student loan: $1960
My wife’s private student loan: $2650
My wife’s other student loans: $41000
I pay $725 to the personal loan, $65 to my student loan, $65 to my wife’s private loan, and $150 (interest only sadly) to the other loans.
At this rate my main debt goals for 2019 are to keep making these payments without accruing any new debt- because the personal loan was the result of consolidating and refinancing several credit cards over the years. I got a great interest rate and a 5 year plan and I’m already overpaying it a little bit, but that doesn’t mean anything if I take on new debt.
If I stay on track, I will have knocked out $6000 of debt principal this year.
I’ve got ID 256
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I paid $455.60 towards eliminating our debt this month. My goal is $7500 for the year. I am currently at $4755.98 paid, which puts me at 63.41% complete. I'm a little disappointed because I was hoping to put a minimum of $700 towards debt each month, but $455 is nothing to scoff at. Hopefully we will be back on track next month. This month was a little rough. But my progress is incredible - so no complaining!!! I am more than halfway to my goal, and still have roughly 9-months to go!
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Another month, another update. This month is pretty standard in terms of debt pay down, but we haven't even made it 7 days in and I'm having to roll with the punches. Escrow went up and the cat had a larger vet bill than expected at his checkup, so there went my fun money this month. Hopefully, things settle down and it stops feeling like money is flying out of my account. 💸
- Starting Balance (January 2019): $69,112.11
- Current Balance: $64,501.77
- Paid Off this Year: $4,610.34
Overall Progress Update:
- Starting Balance (April 2018): $74,400.00
- Total Paid Off: $9,898.23
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Checking in for April - I send all payments out on the 1st of the month and my balances have updated so here goes :)
Starting balance Ending balance
$66,818.48 1st Mortgage $66,314.31
$14,765.81 2nd Mortgage $14,558.19
$13,769.90 Car $12,197.30
$95,354.19 $93,069.80
Total debt paid down in April $2,284.39, YTD 2019 $10,662.05 (40.77% of goal). We're still on track to pay off the car this year - yay!
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Bit of a rant, really. I HATE SELF-EMPLOYMENT so much sometimes. Hubby told me he'd bet getting 32 from a client. I assumed it was thousand (yes, the business income varies enough that this is quite usual), it turned out to be $3200, but that would have been one client plus his usual one...but then the other client decided that they're not paying til next month so that's IT for the month. So down from $12K to $3.2K for the month. Currently WAMMING to cover true expenses. There will be $0 goal progress this month. GRRRR.
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YAY! Tax refund came and before it could simmer in the account long enough for us to change the plan, I sent at least half on its way as we agreed upon a few weeks ago. Chase is now paid off, as is Citibank. So that's $4100 sent off today, for a grand total of 48% toward our smackdown goal for the year!
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Ok, so in 2019, we started January with $23794.70 on my student loans and $3602.95 on a loan for an air conditioner. Our goal is to pay off the air conditioning loan and then avalanche the student loans as much as we can.
January: $1219.41 to the ACL, $405.42 to SL
February: $2397.79 to the ACL, $405.42 to SL
March: $0 to ACL!!!, $405.42 to SL (extra payment of $1350.69 was thwarted, so April's extra payment will be doubled).
By the end of 2019, we will only have $4251.22 left on the SL, so that would be a whopping $4833.46 (Jan-Mar) + $3506.8 (April - $1350*2+405+400) + $15,643.36 (May-Dec) = $23,983.62!
At that rate, the SL should be paid off by March 2020!
I hope we can stay the course! We'll take line 258.
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April Check in -
Happily still on Track! I basically made the same payments I did last month so paid $2789 towards our debt. We'll see if there's any leftover for additional payments at the end of the month but I think I'm going to concentrate on Aging our money and trying to get a month ahead so we have a cushion... One thing I am going to do extra starting next month is budgeting for the interest accrued on our debts (minus the mortgage) and paying that with the debts.
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April Update line 245
I got a significant tax return AND managed to make additional hours at work so I had extra money...In the past, I would have use a big chunk of that money to buy a "well deserve gift" but NOT THIS TIME!
Car loan is DONE! (-765$)
Credit card reduced to 6720$ from 8550$ (-1830$)
Line of credit get down to 4064$ (-86$)I am now at 10 784$ from 13 465$ so 46% of my annual objective.
Also
- got a new card with a 12% rate to replace the old one at 20%. I hope the burden of interest payment will be much less in the future
- I kept 1000$ to build a basic emergency fundLooking forward to kick that debt down!
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Not much to add at the moment. Plugging along. Paid $898 so far in April. Also paid $482 owed in taxes. We are sooooo close yet so far to paying off hubby's car. Payoff is now $1300. We've had to put some money into summer clothes for the kids, stuff we needed around the house, etc so we haven't really been able to add to the principal for that. But regardless it will be paid off June 1 - whatever we owe on it at that point above the regular payment, we're going to take from savings and knock out. We will use that money over the summer to take care of some things coming up that will need to be funded and put a bit back in savings before we rework our snowball.
It's tough now because all the small stuff is paid off and after the car loan is gone, there won't be any more immediate gratification for a while. I think I need to set some mini-goals and celebrations along the way to help us stay motivated. Maybe after each $1500 we can buy a little something for the house or go out to a nice dinner or something.