Celebrate the Small Victories: Paying Down the Heloc

You know you're an adult when you...

a) decide to put your gifted Christmas money toward debt instead of spending it

b) get giddy when you spend way less than budgeted + find leftover money (yes, this happened in December, the most spend happy month of the year) to put toward debt

c) get creative + figure out ways to save money each month to put toward debt

Did I mention #adulting is overrated? Especially if you're in debt. But that's neither here nor there. You can't change the past; what matters is what you do moving forward. For those of you just joining, I wrote a separate post about our heloc (home equity loan) here. Sometimes when you have $80k worth of debt, it's easy to get discouraged + hard to see the progress. That's why I thought it necessary focus on the positive + track what we have put toward the principal amount. Drum roll please...

$880

That's the amount we paid toward the principal last month! Not interest--principal, yay! I wish I would have wrote this sooner to track where each amount came from, but it was a combination of gifted Christmas money, savings from our end of month cash envelope + savings from what we budgeted for our Christmas sinking fund. Who would have thought we could end up in the positive during such a spend happy month? Regardless of the figure, that in itself is worth celebrating because it demonstrates how our behavior, mindset, mentality has shifted in just 4 short months.

We started at just over $80k and our current debt is now $79,733. That number still overwhelms me, but choosing to have a glass half full mentality means 79 is better than 80, right? What ways do you celebrate the small victories to encourage you on your journey + revitalize your energy to keep going? Hope this can be an encouragement today that every opportunity counts + baby steps matter.