I have made a (google docs) spreadsheet which kind of “counts down” the progress I’ve made (err, WILL be making) on our debt. This one above is just for our credit card debt. You can see that I gave a few columns for each credit card, 1 column for the payments, another column for the running balance kind of like a register, and then added a third column to show the actual interest for past months. For months that have already been completed, I put those numbers in bold.

I’ve already found that my method of calculating the interest in the running balance column leaves something to be desired, but it wasn’t too far off, so I am not worrying about it. (I did the calculation like this: (Previous Balance - payment) * 1.012 = new month’s end balance. Then, when the month actually is over and the statement comes, I fill in with the actual new balance and actual finance charge.

(I am WAY far off calculating the interest on our home ec loan, but as it calculates the balance a little HIGHER than it actually is at the end of the month, I feel pretty good putting in the groovy lower number each month, so that’s ok too. Amortization, how you boggle me…)

I find myself checking this spreadsheet out all the time, making little tweaks here and there. Initially we decided that we could throw $1000/ month toward debt, so I populated the spreadsheet with that in mind. The “total paid” column just calculates what the total payments were for the month, which helps me out in the figgerin’. I can glance at it and see if the total monthly figure is what it should be or if i put in too many 0s or something.

Then I got to thinking that we should be getting a FSA dependent care reimbursement each month to the tune of $421 a month. This is kind of “outside” money, as it doesn’t come in from paychecks, so I decided we could throw all that at the debt too, thus our monthly total payment will be $1421.

And the tweaking continues! My husband gets paid every two weeks which results in 26 paychecks a year instead of 24. Realizing that, I decided that the months that he gets 3 paychecks instead of 2, we would just stick that “extra” paycheck toward the debt - thus you can see that for May and Oct the total payments include an extra $1700.

Then I also realized that because there are 26 paychecks for him and he’s doing the FSA plan through his work, the original $421 FSA number is wrong, it’s actually $385 with 2 months (may and oct) being 577. I decided we can try to cough up the extra $36 each month anyway.

I have a master spreadsheet that includes not only the credit cards but the car loan and the home equity loan as well, and what with all my tweaking and fiddling and trying to think up ways to “find” some money, my spreadsheet says that we could be COMPLETELY out of this mess by JULY 2010 — a good 5 months earlier than my original December 2010 estimate/goal.

Now, I know that things can happen, and is actually likely TO happen… But I am feeling pretty good about the original goal of debt-free by 2011 - especially with a 5 month cushion!

I heart spreadsheets. I really do. I could take them home and snuggle them all night long.

Ahem.

Related Posts:

• February 4, 2008 -- The DEBT! And the PLAN! (0)
• April 12, 2008 -- update, and questions we’re asking ourselves (2)
• March 27, 2008 -- update on the no-interest / savings thoughts (0)