Thrifty Thursday: We Did Something Extreme

     ...Or, at least we took the first step in doing something extreme. We bought an old van in hopes of selling our new(er) van we bought last year. 

     About a year ago we decided we needed to "upgrade" our vehicle, since we were expecting our second child, so we traded in our paid-off car and got a mini-van. It was from the previous year and had fairly low miles. The car payment was close to the maximum we thought we could afford. 

     So we've been paying on it for a year. While we can "afford" it, it doesn't give us a whole lot of space and certainly isn't helping us in our plan to get debt free. Besides, who know what will happen in the next couple years?

     So we've been examining our debt snowball and really thinking about stuff and we figured out that if we no longer had a car payment, we could potentially (assuming we still put the same amount toward debt) be debt free in two years. If we keep it, it adds another year to our debt.

     As it stands, the KBB value of our car is a couple grand more than what we owe, so we are pretty certain we can break even at the very least. We got a van--still didn't want to go back down to a car--and while it isn't glamorous, it seems to be a pretty sound vehicle and we hope it will last us a couple years. 

     All that's left is to put our minivan on the market in the next few weeks and working toward paying off our debt (which is mostly student loans. And if you would like to start a debt snowball yourself, you should check out this site. They have a great snowball calculator there.