So my husband got a company phone in January, and we finally decided to cancel his personal cell phone! he didn't like carrying 2 phones around and there's no reason for us to pay for his 2nd phone if we didn't need to. That will save us $50 a month, but of course we got hit with a $290 early termiantion fee. However, his phone was only 3 months old so I am selling thephone and we will break about even.

I have tried to sell it on Facebook groups, Craigslist, etc., in an attempt to avoid Ebay where they will take 10% of my money and then Paypal will take even more of what I have left... any suggestions?

When I googled different sites they all offered me about $210 for the phone, which it seems I can sell on Ebay for about $290 (minus all of the fees, but I would still come out with about $240 or so profit, almost enough to cover the termination fee).

We also refinanced my husband's truck and got a lower payment, so more to add to the snowball!

Thank you creditcardfree!!! After seeing your post, I went on that site and listed a Macys gift card that had about $7 left on it, and 3 Starbucks gift cards that would have taken me years to go through. All in all, I made almost $30!

In other news, I had a set of my boys' Geotrax train tracks that I had been trying to sell for almost a year with no luck. Through a fitness group I belong to, I heard about a family whose mom just walked out on them and left the dad with 3 kids, 2 of which are boys who are 2 and 4 years old. he dad doesn't have a lot of money to buy any extras for them, and the mom has more or less disappeared. I arranged a drop off of clothes, diapers (don't know why they were still in the closet, my youngest has been potty trained for over a year!), and the set of train tracks to be brought to them. Giving those train tracks to kids who are going through what they've been through was far more satisfying than selling them for cash. I had never met this woman (a neighbor) in my life, and she cried and hugged me when she saw all the stuff I had for them. Sometimes money isn't everything!

So we embarked on this debt payoff journey just over a year ago and have paid of $16K in credit card debt since (Still have $74K to go). I have 5 credit cards in my name and DH has 3. The vast majority of our balances are on my cards and he now has about $13K on his. So when I was setting up our debt avalanche, I asked him what his interest rates and balances were, and he was very wishy washy about it. Most of his balances are currently under various promo rates from doing balance transfers, and he assured me that they were all less than what my highest interest card was, so he has just kept paying the minimums on his cards while I throw all of our extra at my highest interest credit card.

Several times over the past 15 months, I have suggested to him that he let me take care of all of the credit card payments and he take over all of the monthly bills. See, we still have separate checking accounts and we each just have certain bills we're responsible for. We lived together before we were married and did it this way then, and have just always kept it that way because we were comfortable with it. We are both very responsible in terms of paying the bills, so neither of us ever worried that something wasn't getting paid or anything like that.

So anyway, we sold our kayaks yesterday and made $800. I took this opportunity to ask him AGAIN to please look up his balances and interest rates and let me make note of them so I can make sure we're attacking our cards in the proper order. I'm a bit type A (okay, more than a bit) and it has been driving me crazy that I don't have complete control over how much we're paying on what. He has been paying more than the minimums on cards with 3.99% interest rates when I would rather put that extra towards my 12.74% card. So anyway, he did check them, and it turns out that he has a $1200 balance on a card with a 15.49% interest rate!! I imeediately told him to take that $800 and pay that card, and on my next paycheck I would give him the balance to pay it off.

SEE!! This is why I want control over it! I am shocked that he didn't even realize what his interest rate was. Of course my obvious irritation with him turned into an argument, and now it's practically giving me heart palpitations to not be in charge of all the credit cards. I am hoping he'll give it some more thought today and realize that I am right and we should adjust the way we've done things for the last 13 years.

I'm so frustrated

I haven't posted any blogs in a long time. It's been quite a year so far.

Most recently, my grandma died on Friday and we're heading to NY for the wake and funeral on Tuesday. It'll be an added expense, but we knew it would be coming soon and deliberately didn't make plans to go to NY this summer because we knew we'd probably be making this trip. She was 88, had battled cancer for a very long time (12 years) and stopped chemo about 5 years ago. They told us 19 months ago that she had a week to live, so I am extremely grateful for all the extra time we had with her, and glad she is no longer in pain. Also tremendously sad, as we were very close.

In other life news, we just returned from a 10 day vacation to Disney World, almost entirely paid for by cashing in my vacation time from work. Could I have cashed it in and put it all towards my debt instead? Sure, but we decided to do this instead and it was worth it to us.

DH now has a company car and we are selling his pickup truck. We will probably make about $7000 profit on it (we owe $9K and it's worth $16-17K), and then save $400 a month in truck payments, $60 a month in insurance, and about $300 a year for personal property tax.

We are then debating between selling our popup camper, or putting a hitch on the minivan so we can tow it locally (which is where we do most of our camping anyway). The problem with selling the camper is that we are underwater on it, and while we could take the profit from the truck and pay off the camper and then sell it, I think it is better use of our money to put it towards the credit cards which have a higher interest rate. I'm not sure exactly what we'll decide to do there....

But we are still making good progress!