Comments on: Savings vs. debt: What’s your priority?

By: Building up savings while getting out of debt | Sense to Save

Building up savings while getting out of debt | Sense to Save — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:39:26 +0000

[…] at Living Well on Less is taking a balanced approach. She’s putting half of her surplus funds toward debt, and the other half toward savings. She […]

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:00:06 +0000

P.S. My husband will be a college professor when he’s all done. We’re hoping he’ll have a good salary, too! :)

By: Karen

Karen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:58:32 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Garden Girl! We are absolutely not racking up debt on our credit cards anymore! I hope you’ll browse around my previous posts to see what we’ve already accomplished, but we’ll be credit card debt free in November and I don’t plan to ever carry a balance again.

As for our savings goals, we’re kind of saving indefinitely for the time being until we’re settled. As I said in the post, we have tuition costs, moving expenses, and emergency savings to build. In my opinion, at this point in our lives with everything we have coming up, it’s not possible for us to save too much. SO rather than setting our goals at an amount, we’re saving until we’re settled into a city where we plan to stay put (which will probably be the next city we move to in 2 years), and then we plan to get our emergency savings fully funded then devote every extra penny to student loans!

Thanks again for the comment, and I hope you come back soon!

By: Garden Girl

Garden Girl — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:53:05 +0000

Well, the question I would ask is how much is enough in savings? After you have reached your savings goal will you then be full-on attacking the debt? That seems reasonable and wise. Are you still racking up debt on the credit cards? It can be very dangerous not to be paying those off every month. Because once the introductory rate is over you may find yourself with a balance that you can’t pay off (like perhaps something happened that took all of your savings to fix, etc.). I don’t know what degree your dh is going to have but I hope the salary will be phenomenal!

I do believe that the borrower is slave to the lender. Kick those lenders to the curb! But you need the cushion of some savings in order to do that (make sense).

I don’t know you but I think you and your dh are doing a great thing about being this serious about your finances.

By: tiffanie

tiffanie — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:10:15 +0000

We focused on savings until we had a $1500 small startup emergency fund set. Then I switched and the $200 I was putting into savings now goes towards credit card debt, along with any other miscellaneous money that comes in, plus the regular amounts we were used to paying. This will get our credit cards paid off in about 2-3 years (over $20k), then we’ll start focusing on the student loans and car loan.

Once I get a job, we’ll probably start putting a little back into savings each month to work towards our bigger goal.

So for us, we’re focusing on debt before savings. At least where we’re at now with the income we have.

By: Karen

Karen — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:00:51 +0000

The interest rate on our credit card is 0%. We transferred the balance on two high-interest cards last December and figured out how much to send them every month to pay it off in 12 months before the 0% promo period ends.

Since our income was so low up until two months ago and the interest rate is 0%, we decided to take our time paying off the card so we wouldn’t be overextending ourselves.

We could afford to pay it off sooner than November now, but I don’t see the point since we’re not paying interest on it, ya know? I’d rather put the money in our savings account where it can earn interest.

By: Kacie

Kacie — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:55:03 +0000

I think it makes absolute sense to do what you’re doing. Dave Ramsey is cool, but his advice isn’t one-size-fits-all, as you’ve said.

We’re focusing on building our savings now, rather than pay off our last debt (car loan). We just feel like we’d be better off right now to have as much liquid cash as we can.

What’s your interest rate on your credit card? What about getting that thing paid off superfast and then redirecting your attention to the student loans?