Keepin' the pace

Paying off debt is arduous. I tend to be a "grab life by the horns" kinda gal and once I make a decision to do something, I do it. That's not to say I'm impulsive, because I'm not. I'll run through a decision six ways to Tuesday before I finally reach a conclusion... but once the decision is reached my focus switches 100% to implementation.

I want to be debt free now. I made the decision years ago that I didn't want to live with consumer debt hanging over my head. So the credit cards were paid off. It wasn't easy, nor was it anywhere near as quick as I wanted it to be. The car loans followed. Although that was an aspect of consumer debt that I did realize would probably come back to bite me again, at least once... after all, I knew that no matter how hard I tried I wasn't going to be able to save enough to pay for a car in full before the cars we'd just paid off died.

But we are limping along Mike's GrandAm as long as we can before we end up in the land of two car payments again. My goal is to have my Saturn paid off early. It's a 48 month loan. There is no way the GA will last another 3.5 years... it probably won't even last three. But if we can get a full year of payments in on the Saturn, and keep setting aside $50 a month towards the downpayment for Mike's next car, we'll be in a better position than we have been in our past vehicle purchases. I'll never finance a car more than 48 months again. 4 years is a long time, but what I've realized is that we tend to drive a car into the dirt within 6 to 7 years. When it hits 200K miles, it starts getting more expensive to maintain than it does to pay a monthly car payment.

Back on topic.... I want to be debt free. Unfortunately, this is not instantaneous the way I'd like. So for now, I just keep reminding myself that I am keeping the pace... slow and steady will win this race against debt.