Thanks for the input, everyone!
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With the information you provided, I would in order:
1. You and spouse get on a detailed monthly budget. You're not going on vacation and if you're in a restaurant, it's because you work there. Brown bag lunches, no unnecessary spending of any kind. Your hair needs to be on fire!
2. Make an effort to find a job closer.
3. Stop all unmatched retirement savings.
4. Build a $1,000 Emergency fund.
Payoff as follows:
1. Credit card.
2. Keep car and pay it off
3. Student loan
4. Build an appropriate emergency fund
5. Begin/resume investing.
- Yes, we are on a detailed monthly budget and have been since we got married. We were almost to the poverty level, I think, when we got married, ha! My husband had lost his job and I was still in college, so we didn't have much of a head start with our finances there 5 years ago :) We haven't been on a vacation since our honey moon 5 years ago and we rarely eat in a restaurant. We take our lunch to work and spend $100/week on food/groceries (We have found that is the sweet spot for us.) We have had a few times here and there where we are will go out and spend alot more that usual (it's basically for sanity, since we are so strict with our budget most of the time), but we are generally not big spenders, and only spend on things of necessity or invest in things we can do at home that will bring in more income for us. We have known about Dave Ramsey since we were married but have gotten discouraged a lot from the financial blows life has dealt at times and gotten on and off his plan on a strict basis.
- My job is wonderful and now-a-days are allowing me to work from home 2 days a week, so that I am driving 3 days a week. I love the company and what I do there, and they pay our health insurance in full. They will be a great company to work with when we have kids. However, I do eventually want to find a job closer. It is not on my active radar at the moment, though, due to the reasons I just stated.
- I agree with stopping all unmatched retirement savings, but I am afraid to do that any longer, since we have already gone that route with the Dave Ramsey plan for a few years (which we did make progress from), but our retirement savings are pitiful, in my opinion, for our age (we're almost 30). I will have to think more about this one.
- Yes, we have been trying since we bought the house in April to rebuild our $1000 Emergency Fund, but things have constantly come up (this breaks, that breaks, lawn mower purchase for 3 acre yard, vet bills, car alternator, car battery, etc...). Now that we have finally made significant progress on paying down the high interest credit cards before they completely drowned us, we can start inching toward that Emergency Fund goal again. We have some music equipment that we are selling that is helping pay down the credit cards.
I'm afraid it will take up to 5 years to finish off the student loans and we can't wait that long to have our retirement contributions on hold, so like I said above, I'll have to think some more on that one. If we were to do that again and wait until the student loans are paid off, then all together, it would basically mean we would have spent 8-10 years of us not contributing properly to retirement. That's unacceptable to me.
I think we'll just attempt to pay off this car as quickly as possible as soon as we can get our credit card mess taken care of in full.
Thank you all for your responses and advice!