HisHersMoney

As we prepare to close out 2008 and begin 2009 it’s time to look at what we’ve accomplished this year and our goals for next year. Back in March when we started this blog Hers had just over $19,700 in debt. Of which, $11,186 was student loan debt. I’m happy to report that all of Hers student loan debt has been erased!

How did we do it? We had two months of free rent as part of our move-in deal at our apartment which we took in Sept and Oct which freed up a big chunk of money. We also put every spare dollar towards it every month and when I received my yearly bonus in Oct I took 100% of it and paid the balance off. I can’t even begin to tell you how great it felt!

Our car debt was $8,528. We just made our regular payments of towards this debt and we currently owe about $4,400. I should be receiving another bonus in Dec and plan on paying this debt off completely. When trying to figure out where to apply my bonus funds we looked at all of our balances and all of our monthly payments and decided that completely eliminating the car debt on that car would have the biggest impact on our monthly cash flow.

So, you would think I would be able to claim debt freedom on the Hers side of things. Not so fast. There was a rather large purchase made shortly after we got married in August. You see, we bought this convertible BMW. The one we purchased is about a year old and originally costs about $55k and we paid around $43k for it. While still a substantially huge amount of money at least some one else ate the first $12k of depreciation. We did a four year loan for $37k and paid the rest cash. The payment is absolutely ridiculous (around $900 a month) but I absolutely love it.

So while many things have been paid off, we go into 2009 with a car loan of just over $35k.