When I first started this blog I put out a post that I wanted to be debt free, except my mortgage by the time I was 45.
As time went along and as I read more into personal finance I actually thought my original goal wasn’t a very good one. In fact, I started to focus more on saving and investing than paying off all my debt except my mortgage.
Because of an act of Congress it is possible that I might have my student loans paid off by my 45th birthday. I am not sure if that will happen and I am making my regular payments until then.
But I also have some consumer debt including a car payment and a little bit left on a credit card. I, however, had enough money in savings and my emergency fund to pay off the debt. I think I have been holding onto that money depending on the results of our IVF experience (see update).
As we get deeper into the adoption process the more I kept playing monetary mental gymnastics about how to pay for everything. It was actually keeping me up at night. I was worrying about how I was going to cash flow everything over the next year. How would I keep an emergency fund, pay off the consumer debt, continue to invest in my retirement accounts, and pay for an adoption?
For whatever reason, I decided enough was enough and one day last week I paid off the credit card and car loan.
Done!
Boom!
Gone!
The down side is that it took a good chunk of our savings. Savings that we could’ve used for adoption, emergencies, or paying down debt. My cash flow has gone down.
But I feel better.
I feel cleaner.
I feel like I can focus on one issue. I no longer have to worry about those debts. I can just focus on saving money for our adoption.
It might have been smarter to save that money and keep the cash on hand, but I was keeping myself up at night worrying about it all.
So I pulled the trigger. And we are consumer debt FREE!!!!
Now if I am able to receive public service loan forgiveness the only debt I will owe will be our mortgage, but that leaves a conundrum about how to pay for the adoption expenses.
More on that another time. For the moment I feel financially pretty good, but there are storm clouds on the horizon.
Maybe I will be debt free by 45 after all. Whodda thunk?
