It’s the beginning of a new year… Alright, so it’s 3 months in to the new year already. But for almost everyone, it’s tax time. Having four kids equals deductions for us, so we always get a little bit back. We’ve been paying extra on our car payment, knowing it will be paid off sometime in 2023, but that time came earlier than expected!
I have a modge podge of self created excel sheets to track our finances, and cute graphic sheets to track savings and debts. This car loan tracker is from debtfreecharts.com. I had really slacked off last year with tracking finances, so I sat down and redid the whole budget planner at the beginning of 2023, so our starting balance was from January, 2023. You can see the 3 shaded areas that were our normal payments for January, February, and March. When taxes hit our account, we finished off the loan.
This ends our car loans, at least for awhile. We still aren’t sure what we are going to do for a car for the kids. They could certainly drive the Acadia, but it’s a bit big for just a single person driving to work, so I wouldn’t mind something a bit smaller for them to be able to use. My little car I use for work is a manual transmission, and although I want the kids to know how to drive stick, I don’t want them to have to drive it all the time. We don’t even have permits yet, even though two are old enough for them, and we have no issues getting the oldest to and from work right now, so it’s not an immediate concern for us.
We have some medical debt coming into play, and a propane fill for the house, so once we get payment plans in place for those, this car payment will probably roll right over into those payments. Not the most ideal situation when the goal is to “snowball” it to the next debt in line, but it’ll keep us at a status quo as far as the amount of money going out each month towards our debts.
I’ll be super grateful when we are done with yearly x-rays, braces, and cavities!!