An avalance or a snowball?

Sorry for my brief hiatus, but something grabbed a hold of every spare second of time I had last week. I couldn’t stop thinking about it- I dream about it, worry about it, and talk about it incessantly (my poor husband).

What am I talking about?

This:

 

A house.

It just seems like the next logical step, you know? Meet on Match.com, date long distance for 3-years, get engaged, Monica moves to a small town to be with Daniel, they marry, and buy a house and live happily ever after. It just makes sense. And this logical progression makes it even MORE difficult to realize that it’s not going to happen right now. It’s not going to happen in a year either. It’ll be 2. Two LONG years. Yeah, two years will probably fly by, but it’s still 24 months, 730 days, and a lot of hours, minutes, and seconds. It hurts my heart to wait. Really it does. Owww.

Or it could be that I am in literal pain from falling down yesterday. In heels. In front of a few college students. More on that later, I am sure you’re dying to know.

I tell all this to Daniel who proceeds to look at me with the saddest face ever because he knows we can’t buy a house right now. Mainly being that we want to live in San Antonio, Texas (Go Spurs!) and we live/work in Beeville, Texas. Can’t exactly pick up and buy a house in San Antonio without a job in San Antonio, right? The other issue is credit card debt. We need to get it completely eliminated. I won’t discuss our super intimate financial details in this blog, but let’s just say it’s something we got to get rid of.

I know Dave Ramsey is super popular over on The Nest’s Money Matters board, so we did more research on it, and we’re doing a modified plan. Then I went to Google and I found an amazing, free credit card debt reduction Excel sheet. We plugged in all of the credit cards, store credit cards, and even the car loan. The spreadsheet then calculates how much you need to pay per month in order to get it paid off depending on your budget. We set aside a LARGE portion of our salary for this because we want to get this DONE with. The spreadsheet created a 22-month pay-off plan for us, and we’re thrilled. All debts will be paid off by May 2011 leaving us with only student loan debt when we search for a house that summer.

We did have to decide whether to do a snowball approach or an avalanche approach. A snowball approach is basically paying off your smaller debts first. We’re guessing this method is popular because it’s instant gratification- you get stuff paid off and it feels good. The avalanche approach is paying off higher interest rates first. We’re going this route. All my credit cards have no interest, while Daniel’s have high balances at a 20% interest rate, so it makes sense for us.

I’m excited and scared all at the same time because I realize the next 22-month are going to be really rough on us. No more frivolous purchases, no more eating out every meal, no more extravagant Christmas gifts. It’s going to require some sacrifices, but 22-months will go by fast…right?