Bye Bye, Hallie!

These last few weeks were crazy! My wife and I decided to sell one of our cars. It was a 2007 Honda Accord Coupe (pics to follow) named Hallie. It only had 68,000 miles on it and blue-booked it at $14,000. We still owed about $7,000 on it and were paying $320 a month towards that. So, we sold the car for $13,750 and made a little over $6,000 on the car sale! Woo hoo! We are using this $6,000 to pay down some other debts that we have. With one big swoop, we just got rid of $13,750 of debt! Making this decision was certainly not easy and big props to my wife for going out of her comfort zone to sell her car. However, this is a decision that will pay off in the long run.

All we have now is a 2002 Honda Accord that was a gift for my graduation from high school. It is paid off and has 116,500 miles on it. We just spent $800 to get it cleaned up and make sure the mechanics were good, which obviously they weren't because we spent $800! We are hoping my Honda lasts us another 5 years, or 200,000 miles. We should have paid off all of our debts long before this time allowing us to pay cash for a new car as a reward to ourselves for being crazy.

In addition to selling the car, we finally got rid of Comcast! Woo-hoo! I had been wanting to do that for so long. We were paying $125 a month for their service. Since cancelling them, I switched over to AT&T for internet only at $29.99 a month. This will save us an additional $95 this month to apply towards our debt. This was also not an easy decision. This is a major compromise on my part. I love being able to watch football on the weekends. It breaks my heart that I do not get ESPN. However, I was able to go to Bestbuy and purchase an RCA indoor antenna for $11. I get all of the major channels like CBS, NBC, Fox, and ABC plus about 20 other local channels. Luckily, I still get most of the games and CBS and ABC will always play the big games on Saturdays and I will get some good NFL games on Sunday through NBC and Fox. All of these channels come in HD and look BEAUTIFUL on the TV. I am very excited about free-HD. We also signed up for a subscription to Hulu Plus for $8 a month to get all of our shows we may miss.

In addition to the Comcast savings, when I cancelled my wife's car insurance with USAA, it saved us $57 a month! I am very excited about this. From now on, we will be able to apply approximately $472 extra a month to debt. Moreover, when we use our $6,000 profit from the sale of the car, we will be able to clear up an additional $100 a month by paying off one our student loans. So, we basically just gave ourselves a $572 raise per month or $6864 over a year. Pretty awesome I would say!

I do want you guys to know that it is NOT this easy. We have been married 2 years and we always talked about it for two years, but we never made an effort. We would get ready to start the program and then something would happen to prevent us from being aggressive like we are now. Luckily, the timing has worked out for us now and we are being really intense about reducing our debts. I can't wait to see how much debt we are able to pay this month.

Next up are those dang student loans! In the mean time, I will start to post some other websites I look to for inspiration. I will also talk about some of my investments I have made. I would love for any of your insight and expertise in the matter. I find investing really interesting and fun and I am always looking for ways to increase my wealth too.

As always, thanks for reading. Here is a picture of Hallie to send you off...

Bye Bye, Hallie!