August is hard, friends.

That’s when school starts back up, and since everyone in our house is either a teacher or a student, August means we have to readjust to a life of packing lunches, lesson plans, homework, carpooling, grading, learning new names, and actually showering on a regular basis (I speak the truth, people).  All that sucks up a majority of our time, which doesn’t allow for much money-making to throw at our debt (or for me to blog, which is why it’s been awhile, sorry).

Our required minimum payment for the student loans is $400/month.  With what we budget, we typically pay down at least $1,000/month.  In the midst of going back to school, this month we were still able to pay off:

$2,541.  

You can check out our current balance here.

Not bad.  I will be honest, though.  Even though that is a lot, it’s hard to see those numbers compared to last month.  Those numbers are also not going to get us to our goal to be debt free by January 1, 2017.  That means we’re going to have to kill it going forward.

Here is what we did in August to pay down our debt:

• I made a decent profit through my Bondbons business.
• My husband put in many hours with his Promise Painting and Contracting Business.
• I was paid for a few cake pop classes I taught at Sweet! in July.
• We discovered an issue with our home security system and received a credit.
• I was paid for working on a curriculum committee through my school district over the summer.
• We budgeted earlier in the summer to visit my parents in Ohio.  We ended up spending way less than what we allotted, so the leftover money went toward the debt.

I also wanted to touch on our compound interest.  It’s the devil when it’s working against you. When we got serious about paying off our student loans nearly two years ago, we were paying $10.93 just in interest PER DAY.  Today, our daily interest is $6.61.  In two years that is a difference of:

$4.30 PER DAY

$129.60 PER MONTH

$1,576.80 PER YEAR

I delight in the fact that less and less of our hard-earned money is going toward interest and more and more is paying down that principal.

Stay tuned for our next update on October 1st.

Love,