Debt Free Kid

I just updated the side bars and I noticed - unless I made an error previously - that my student loan balance is going UP instead of DOWN. I have read about this happening to other people, but because I have diligently applied and been accepted for the Repayment Assistance program every six months, I thought my balance was actually going down. This puts the pressure on me to shift my fast-track payment from the car loan to the student loans. This is starting to feel right, because the student loans are old, so old, from 1996 - 2005 and I don't want to deal with them anymore. I am making an extra $20 a month car payment and now I am going to increase the student loan payments. I haven't increased the mortgage payment yet. The big news is that I started a full-time job in August, and I saw my first, full, real paycheque on Oct. 28. I saw an increase of $588 in my take-home pay, which is nothing to sneeze at, but our expenses for before and after-school care will increase dr...

What would I do if I didn't have to work? Near the end of my previous relationship, I was trying to make a case for early retirement (aka "financial independence.") Partner (ex) couldn't imagine not working his 45-hour-a-week job for the next 35 years and also could not imagine what he would do with all that time off. The only thing I could think of at the time was "travel!" but we knew if that were to become a reality we would have to have much much better finances. So, now I'm on my own, and I'm still planning my early retirement. Even though my collective agreement tells me that I can't access my pension until the first day of the first month following my 60th birthday, I hope to be finished working by 55, which is now 15 years from now. Ten years more of work would be even better. What would I do if I didn't have to work? - set my alarm for 7:30 am and get up around 8:00 - see my son off to school - practice yoga for two hours ...

I'm supposed to be on my way to the big city right now with Bean to meet up with my mom's family for xmas dinner, but I got a call today saying that my Gramma is sick, and we are postponing to maybe next weekend. She is the reason why we get together so we meet at a restaurant near her condo. Since everyone has to drive in, and one of my cousins is also sick, and another cousin spent christmas with her baby son at Sick Kids Hospital, we will wait to get together. I spent the morning organizing all my photo files from 2014, which I will transfer over to two separate external hard drives. I also cleaned up my desktop on my laptop. I'm trying to catch up on Feedly, but am almost three weeks behind again on blogs. Maybe I need to go through and delete a bunch, but I don't really want to. I get a lot of ideas reading other people's blogs, but I rarely come here to flesh them out. I have been meaning to write about my solo home-buying adventure for weeks, but I'm ...

Thanks to this post on The Simple Dollar , I learned about a site called unbury.me , which gave me something to think about regarding my debt repayments. I plugged in my minimum amounts: 1) Mortgage - $862/month at 2.94% (paid bi-weekly, but there was no place to show the two months of the year where I pay $1291 - I guess I could have used $933 as the average); 2) Car - $250/month at 1.9%; 3) Student Loans - $144/month at 4% (I guessed, since there are actually four loans with different percentages - the most common one is Prime + 1.5%). The result told me that I should continue making these minimum payments until March 2021, when the car will be paid off, and that $250 can then go onto my student loan payment. In October 2024 the student loans will be gone, and the combined $250 + $144 goes onto the mortgage, paying it off by October 2030. This is pretty cool because I have decided I want the mortgage paid off in 15 years so that I can think about early retirement. October ...