Words of the Week Wednesday 11/12

It is Wednesday again and time to provide my readers with links to sites that I found interesting in the last week.

1. $5 Dinner Mom. Erin Chase has one of the best blogs out there. She shows you how to feed a family of 4 dinner for $5 or less! The meals are really simple and taste wonderful. She also has a new cookbook out, so check that out while you are at her site.
   
2. Makeusof.com. This site is more for the techy person. The reason I love it is because there are so many links to free programs, free graphics and more. It is a great site if you are interested in anything from computers to phones to graphics and more.
   
3. Wisebread.com has a HUGE list of the top 100 personal financial blogs listed on its site. If you are interested in finding some new blogs to read check that out.
   
   
   
   
   

Debt Pay Off

Yesterday I mentioned how we used our income tax refund to pay off all our credit cards. Below is a break down of how much we paid to each of the cards.

I also wanted to share with you something that I found very interesting. When my husband received his Juniper bill last month there was a chart on the first page. It showed how long it would take to pay off the bill if you only paid the minimum and if you paid $51. It only showed how much you would pay.

Very interesting huh? The minimum payment was $32.92 a month. So, just by paying an extra $20 a month, we would cut the amount of time it took to pay it off by 18 YEARS and pay about $1257 LESS! This is just proof positive that you can get all your credit cards paid off just by sending in a little more money each month.

Paying off Bills with Income Tax Refund

Well, it's tax season. For some of us that means paying in, while others get a refund. Somehow we ended up getting a nice chunk of change this year. My husband and I decided that we would pay off all our credit card debt and save the rest. We paid over $6000 on credit cards and are now debt free in regard to credit cards. The only debt we have left is the van loan and school loan. Since, we would like to get a house built on our land as soon as we can, we have decided that we will save the rest for a down payment.

It feels really awesome to not have the weight of all that debt on our shoulders anymore. We were spending about $200 on credit card debt a month (we always paid extra) and now we have that money to put in our savings each month. I was also able to add $450 to our emergency fund so now we have $1000 in there.


Even if you are only getting a small amount for a tax refund, you can use this amount to reduce your debt. You can either use it for your highest interest debt or your smallest debt. Paying off your smallest debt first gives you a sense of accomplishment when it is paid off. As an added bonus, you also now have that amount to put towards the next debt to pay off. This is called snowballing.


What are you doing with your tax refund? I'd love to hear from you.

It's Sunday

Hi everybody. I hope you are all having a great day and staying warm. Hope my friends in the mid-atlantic states are enjoying the snow. I am actually envious of them since all the snow this year has actually missed us.

I will keep this short since i am posting this through ping.fm. It is a convenient website that lets you post to all your social media at the same time. We will see how it looks. I am now off to work on homework for my classes. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and the superbowl.