{"id":313,"date":"2023-03-10T10:54:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T15:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=313"},"modified":"2023-03-31T11:12:26","modified_gmt":"2023-03-31T15:12:26","slug":"goodbye-car-payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=313","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye Car… Payments!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ll be super grateful when we are done with yearly x-rays, braces, and cavities!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,78],"tags":[121,150,151,11,149,13,148,80,14],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-budget-talk","category-finances","tag-121","tag-budget","tag-budget-planner","tag-budget-talk","tag-car-loan","tag-debt-payoff","tag-debt-snowball","tag-financial-friday","tag-financial-planning"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/20211229_113105_00008678772977503413958.png?fit=940%2C788&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":28,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=28","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":0},"title":"Budget Talk – Medical Debt 2022","date":"December 27, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"One thing my family has been actively working on this past year is getting out of debt. I actually started a debt payoff journey on YouTube early last year, but ended up not keeping up with it after a couple of months because life got extremely busy between work, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Budget Talk"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/20211227_103602_00003723365761435641241.png?fit=1200%2C300&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":861,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=861","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":1},"title":"Metal Mouth","date":"August 5, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"As a family with 4 kids, it was inevitable that someone would need braces. Unfortunately for our budget, 4 out of 4 need them. And on top of braces, they all 4 need upper frenum clippings. Kid #1 had \"junior braces\" on the top before a full set, because she\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Budget Talk"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/png_20211229_100926_00008925482664343825079.png?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1070,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=1070","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":2},"title":"2026… Bracing for Impact","date":"January 16, 2026","format":false,"excerpt":"The world is a mess, and everyone is just trying to survive. That seemed to be 2025's theme, but it didn't start off that way. Logging back into this blog, I see 4 draft posts for 2024 that I never finished. They need photos and refinement. Maybe that'll happen this\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ramblings"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/20211229_095421_00008393513576783207482.png?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":35,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=35","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":3},"title":"Juggling Time","date":"December 28, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"It\u2019s no lie that I am terrible at organizing my time. I work part-time. The girls have activities. I lead a Girl Scout troop (and cookie season is on the horizon). I am now a co-director for a play with the local community theater if we can get locations secured\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ramblings"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/20211227_142106_00002491359081776000170.png?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":293,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=293","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":4},"title":"Spare Bedroom Makeover","date":"January 10, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"One of the first rooms we did when we moved into the house was the spare bedroom. We had sold our house and moved into tiny barn in October of 2015, and we had a few months of limbo while we waited to see if our loaning bank, the bank\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Home Renovations"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/catastrophicstardust.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/20220107_112118_00001304188166017962453.png?fit=1200%2C600&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":714,"url":"https:\/\/catastrophicstardust.com\/?p=714","url_meta":{"origin":313,"position":5},"title":"Reflections on Life","date":"January 29, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"Things always seem to be busy. I have tons of blog posts I haven't written. 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