For the most part, I like Dave Ramsey's TMM plan. We're working hard on baby step 2 (debt snowball for non-house/student loan debts) and are hoping to be on to baby step 3 (beef up the $1000 emergency fund from baby step 1) before the end of the year. This is our 4th month on this plan. Unfortunately, I feel like our accumulated debt snowball at this point could still easily fit in the palm of one hand. And just last month we had to regress to baby step 1 for a bit while we took care of some car/business income troubles we had.

And now this month yet again, one of our cars is going to keep us from being able to get traction on our debt snowball yet again. This is the 3rd month out of the last 4 that we have had car expenses over $800, and is already easily more than we paid the entire year before. WTF? We were long overdue though for 4 new tires that we were hoping to put off until next month's tax return came in. An unexpected flat (and consequent tow) made that happen this month instead though and altogether we are out another $850. The only good thing I can say about this is that we managed to trim enough excess off our spending this month that we did not have to tap in to the emergency fund to pay for that again. But I'm not sure how much extra there will be now to apply to our credit cards once again.

So we will probably continue to pay only slightly above the minimums on all our cards for yet another month. Luckily they are all on no interest promotional periods right now, but those will gradually expire this year and balance transfers cost 3-4% of the balance. In truth, it is not as bad as all that because we do have our big tax return and hubby's bonus coming our way soon, and once we get those we should be about 2/3 of the way done already. But I guess I feel like that's cheating.

I wanted this debt snowball to get started through our own budgeting successes and not just a once a year cash windfall. And I suppose one could argue that that's still true here. In a parallel life, one where we did not start our Total Money Makeover, I am certain hubby and I's straits would be much more dire right now. We would have spent a lot more money than we should have on other things and we would have ended up adding more to credit cards when the emergencies came in. We would have planned to throw and little at the credit cards with our tax return/bonus, but also prioritized a new fridge and laptop above our debt payoffs. We would have had a lot more fun going on monthly date night like we used to, but we'd also be a lot more in debt and certainly no closer to our long term financial goals.

At least that's what I like to tell myself. And its probably true. But who knows what my old self would have done for sure. I'm not a complete idiot, just a little desirous of short term rewards at the expense of long term gains. And I was a little fuzzy on the overall game plan long term. But still, on weeks like this, I wish there were a way to see my bank accounts in that parallel life next to this one, so I could know that we truly are making progress.

End of month accounting to follow soon.