That Car Loan is GOING DOWN

I did as everyone advised: we put all of the money from my side hustle check to our car loan. (Well, almost all of it: $1600.) That brought the balance down to $631.45! I am super stoked to see it that low and it’s giving me a sense of accomplishment, which I really did need right now!

We bought the car in May 2012 (for more than we should have spent on a used car without the best reliability ratings). We started with a loan at $9,135, and have paid off almost all of it in two years. As you can see from the graph below, we only started paying on it aggressively since January 2014. The minimum payment is just $172 a month. (It looks like we did make a big payment in August 2013, but I don’t remember where that extra $900 came from.)

In other good news, when our May payment on the Citibank card goes through, that will be down to $500. We’re really close to hitting our first milestone – having the car loan and the Citibank credit card paid off by June 15th – since I started blogging in January (5 months ago, already?!).

My original goal was to have the car paid off before the end of 2014, then I thought we should try harder and get it paid off in the fall. Looks like we’re on track to get it paid off by June 15th, which I thought was a pie-in-the-sky goal. YES!

This really shows that, despite feeling sorry for myself and having that pity party recently, things can turn around pretty quickly. I knew I was going to get a side hustle paycheck, but I didn’t realize it would be so high (because it’s based on the hours I work, it fluctuates from month to month). That extra really helped our bottom line. Maybe it’s small to some people, maybe some people would think it’s as amazing as I do, but what it really comes down to is how much better I feel about our financial situation. That light at the end of the tunnel is growing bigger and brighter! I know we’ll have more discouraging times after we hit this milestone in June, and I will have to try to remember how awesome this felt and how far we have come in order to stay motivated to continue.

I really don’t love being in $70,000+ student loan/consumer debt, but at least I’m starting see to see some of the payoff. Woohoo!