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So for the time being I am going to be putting a hold on our savings goals. We have more than the $1000 recommended emergency fund going for us, so I figured rather than continuing to send the $200/month to savings…I’m going to snowflake that amount into our debt snowball!

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before tonight. I was so focused on wanting to still save some money that I was afraid to put that on hold! So now I have an extra $200/month to send to debt! That’s exciting to me. I’m already listing in order when I should have certain credit cards paid down. It’s the motivation that I needed!

I’m still going to continue to add to our auto maintenance fund ($50/month) and our car insurance fund ($140/month). We renew our car insurance every 6 months and I like to have that money at hand so it’s just become habit to save it each month.

A rough sketch shows that we should be able to be credit card debt free by April or May of 2010.  So, by my 26th birthday.  Like I said, rough sketch.  That’s a little over $23,000 in credit debt paid off in 20 months or so.  The awesome thing about the debt snowball is that I will have 4 credit cards paid off by January, which is a nice momentum and good motivation.  (We have a lot of credit cards between the two of us…9 to be exact.  Kind of crazy.  Four with balances below $1000, three below $2000, one at $2500, and one at $12000 — rough estimates.)  Once I get all those smaller ones paid off…that big ol’ hefty one should be no problem.

Roughly $900 a month in base payments + $200 from what we were sending to checking = paid off in 20 months or so.  This isn’t counting a penny of other snowflaked income, though!  So I’m hoping to whittle a few months off that, at least!