We're Debt Free!!

We did it. We finally paid off our last debt: our auto loan. Last January, my wife and I had discussed finally paying off the our loan. We sat down and determined that August would be a reasonable timeframe where we could pay it off. As the months went on, we found more money left at the end of the month than we had originally planned. We would set that extra money aside into our savings account, just to make sure that we could cover any budget items that we must have forgotten about. Most of the time, my next paycheck came and we had a little bit more to set aside in the savings account. After attending Dave Ramsey's Live Event in May, we got the extra push we needed to keep $1000 in savings and use the rest to pay down the loan.

On June 5th, we were able to pay the loan down to $1050. The next two weeks were some of the longest weeks that I can remember, for two reasons: 1) we've been waiting for this day for a while, and 2) we got so excited about paying down the loan that we had to make our budget stretch farther than we had anticipated.

This morning I walked into one of the branches of Chase Bank. The first person I saw when I walked in was a banker. I stated that I was there to pay off my auto loan, and for a second it looked like he was trying to remember how to complete a payoff. He took me to his desk, looked up my account, and wrote down the payoff amount. I wrote a check for that amount, and he said that it would take about a week for the payoff letter and the title to be sent to my house. I also got the phone number of a Chase Auto Finance department so that I could call and cancel the automatic payments from our checking account.

I walked out of that bank and it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I called my wife and told her the news. When I got home that evening, we celebrated with pizza and roasted marshmallows (no credit cards this time!).

Now our focus is to put away 6 months worth of expenses. We estimate we could live on about $3000 per month. We plan on taking a vacation or two and finishing our emergency fund by next summer.