Quick debt update (Jan.2013)

My usual/annual debt paydown update post (normally on the last day of January) will be late, this year, and will cover slightly more than a year, because of some sudden/recent changes to our financial planning/future we’ve been making. But within a few weeks we’ll be down to 1 credit card ($8.7k) and the 1 student loan ($37.7k) payment, carrying roughly $46.5k in debt. Since we were at $60.7k total debt at the end of January last year, by the time I post my detailed update we’ll have paid off $14.2k of our debt in a little over a year.

Then, some time in late February, we’ll start trying to buy a house and probably triple (or more) our total debt, and slow down our consumer & student loan debt paydown by quite a few years (not to mention how long it takes to pay off a mortgage). I’ll probably do another update after we close on a house, and after I’ve had a chance to create a whole new set of spreadsheets and calculations to manage the new financial situation we’ll be creating for ourselves over the next few months. If everything goes the way we hope, we’ll still be able to accelerate our debt paydown (beyond minimum payments, including on the mortgage, eventually), just not as much as we have been these last 5 years.