For the first four weeks of July, I turned on the firehose in Facebook Marketplace, selling everything I could find to make money to throw at the mortgage. Let me tell you what sells: anything people can organize their crap into: shelving units, shoe organizers, and cabinets of all sorts! I unloaded a pile of huge space-takers in my home and breathed a sigh of relief every time one of them was hauled out the front door. Also, who knew we had that many ladders? Y’all, I made $530.00 this month selling crap from around my house! I heard a study once that the average American house has over $3,000 worth of stuff lying around.
Ahhh…space. Shout out to minimalism here: while no one will ever call me a minimalist, I do aspire to reduce my clutter and live a life with more meaning and less stuff. The older my kids get, the easier this becomes, but it has also taken a great deal of mental work to let the stuff go.
We also squeezed $150 out of each of my paychecks to send to the mortgage, and our regular mortgage payment knocked $340.14 off the principal. We were under our grocery budget by $23.04 and received a flexible spending account reimbursement of $11.33, so I sent those in additionally (hello, zero-based budget). We took all of Clint’s paychecks for July, subtracted the dental bills ($205) and school supplies ($170!), and dumped $1,624 on the principal to finish off the month.
With that extra push, we are finally on the board–we’re playing Debtris with the mortgage. I was waiting til we hit a nice round number to start coloring in my chart and we did it–we rolled under $150,000 on the mortgage this month and I colored in my first blocks. Heidi Nash at Debt Free Charts has a ton of fun printables to help you get a visual on your debt repayment. Every block on ours is $750. We only have to color in 200 blocks to pay off the house. Only two hundred. Not overwhelming at all. Stop. Just focus on the next block.
Kitchen renovations are on indefinite hold until it gets cooler. It’s annoying seeing that half inch line of ugly tan paint above my new counterline, but we’re so busy right now, and Lowe’s wants too much to install it, that we’re waiting for work to slow down some before we take on a tiling project.
After a busy first four weeks, we dipped out to the ocean and had a beautiful family vacation. It was weird wearing masks everywhere and having to wait in line just to get into Wal Mart, but we paid cash for the whole trip and had a great time!
I know every month won’t be like this one–we paid $2,828.51 toward the principal on our house! But it sure was exciting to see those numbers adding up to get us that much closer to complete debt freedom. Now that’s working hard so we could play hard!
I hope your summer has been everything you hoped it’d be!
Erica
| Assets | Value | Owed | Totals |
| Farmhouse | $200,000.00 | $147,952.70 | $52,047.30 |
| Credit Cards | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Family Car | $2,000.00 | $0.00 | $2,000.00 |
| Truck | $1,500.00 | $0.00 | $1,500.00 |
| Savings & Investments | $67,334.83 | $67,334.83 | |
| $270,834.83 | $147,952.70 | $122,882.13 | |
| Assets | Liabilities | Net Worth | |
| Total Debt Payoff Percentage: | 46.44% | ||
| 07/31/20 |