It's time to get real again

about our debt. We've been getting back into old habits. Not thinking about how much debt we have. Spending money on things that aren't necessities. Like eating out. A lot.

When I first posted about our debt I just said that we had over $20,000 in consumer debt. I didn't give exact numbers, exact interest rates, exact anything. I think in order to keep myself accountable I'm going to start posting here at least once per month, in detail, about our debt.

This is the post for June. Our debt in detail:

Bank of Montreal Credit Card
Balance as of today: $7524.51
Interest Rate: 12.9% (fixed)

ING Direct Line of Credit #1
Balance as of today: $4857.17
Interest Rate: 6.7% (variable)

ING Direct Line of Credit #2
Balance as of today: $4836.50
Interest Rate: 4.2% (variable)

Total: $17218.18

What I normally do is pay the minimum amount on the two ING accounts since their interest rates are lower, and pay as much as possible towards the credit card. I also transfer any available money from those accounts after the minimum payments are made back into our chequing account and apply it to the credit card. So the lines of credit are pretty much always maxed out, but they have lower interest rates anyways and it's best to put all the money we can towards our highest interest rate to get it paid off quickly.

I also haven't been focusing on our budget properly so we probably have an abundance of money on our chequing account that can go towards debt repayment. I will be looking into that today and also creating our June budget, which I haven't done yet. We have a wedding to attend in Quebec at the beginning of August and that's definitely going to have an effect on our budget, so I want to get this all settled so that we're in the best position possible when the wedding comes around.

It's time to get serious about this again and we really need to keep ourselves accountable.