Okay, after much humming and hawing, I have (officially) decided to go forward with my aggressive savings plan. What I am going to do is put aside in savings the money that I had been spending on Credit Card Debt Elimination.
So, what that means is that each month I will be putting into savings $1500.00. Sure, this means that by the end of the year I will have 18,000.00 in savings, but not really.
I plan to first build up my mid-term savings to my goal of $6000.00 and leave it there. Then I plan to put my savings money into (an alleged) high interest savings account. As in, the kind that takes a day or two to get money out of it: an investment account.
It is the money in this account that I will use to pay first my Truck off and then my trailer. This means that I may take a month or two longer than my target of December of next year to pay the truck off, but in doing it this way I will keep my contingency fund intact, and make a couple of bucks in interest.
My idea is to utilize and leverage the mortgage payment structure of Wanda’s loan to my advantage. I am not going to crank up those payments anytime soon; in fact I don’t plan to do that at all. What I will do is pay the small payments that I am doing now and then pay the loans off all at once, first one then the other.
This way I will have access to that money in case I get laid off, or perhaps a steal of a deal on a piece of land or property comes along. Only at a time of my choosing will I pay off one of the loans early. If for any reason that I can’t pay a loan off early, oh well, I have a pile of cash in savings and the loan will run its course to its predetermined end date.
As far as my personal overdraft is concerned, well, I will trickle save that back up. I am currently half way into it and it looks like I will be there for a few months yet. That is okay, as this is my own overdraft and not the bank’s overdraft. Don’t worry, I am still above zero in the account, at least as far as the bank is concerned.
I could just put off my savings plan for a month and take care of my own overdraft nicely, but that won’t do. More importantly it will set an unsettling precedent, that this savings plan is voluntary. I plan to keep this forced savings plan up for as long as possible, at least until the truck and then trailer is paid off, an estimated three years.
As far as my trip down to the coast this summer goes, I will overfund my savings account in order to pay for it. I hope to have enough saved up by then and, if not, into my mid-term savings I will dip. After which I will trickle save it back up again. What I will not do is pause or dip into my long-term savings (investment) account; that is set aside for my next goal of total debt freedom.
I also plan to put aside $50.00 a payday and whatever I get from my tax return into my RRSP and build that up along the way. It is nice to be on this side of the financial ledger, and looking at savings and investments and RRSP’s (oh my).
This is a bold plan, I know, but it is one that I know that I can do. I scrimped and saved to pay those damn credit cards off, so I know that I can pay this amount each month. The difference is that I will be paying myself, buying my own freedom. In essence, I am redeeming myself from my indentured servitude.
Just having this goal does make bearing the cold nights that much easier, knowing that one day, I will own my home. Before too long I will be totally free to do what I want, when I want, where I want, and always be home . . . wherever I roam.
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