Was going to give mrs. hub til wednesday but with taxes being due I couldn't help myself and we had the talk the other day. Since i've already pretty much told you guys everything except our social security numbers, I don't mind filling in a few more of the unsavory details:
*So she (we) are staring down the barrel of
a cool hondo. (Like I said, she decided she wanted to go to the finest colleges money could buy). 40k in consolidated federal which she has been paying, 15k in private sallie mae which she has also been paying, and the dreaded 45k from the mafia which, as Trim accurately surmised, had gone into default and so now they are demanding to be paid in full real fast.
*The original offer from the debt collection agency was she come up with $5k in 3 weeks, and then they would accept $1600/mo for the next 24 months. Since i'll be getting $2k back from my tax return that I will give to her instead of making an additional house payment, that will put us pretty close to being able to fork over the $5k they are asking for, although from what I've seen here I am confident they can and will negotiate to something a little more reasonable like a smaller up front payment and a smaller monthly payment stretched out over 3 years instead of 2.
*We went over our monthly budget and were able to cut out $300/mo by lowering our grocery budget, cutting out the sweet cable tiers, but the bulk of it came from our agreeing to sacrifice the portion of our monthly budget that was allocated to "general savings/oh crap something broke"
*Another big adjustment we hadn't made was for another $900/mo which we had been putting into our account to pay for our wedding. We've only been married a few months now and I guess we hadn't gotten around to adjusting our budget since we'd finished paying off our wedding related expenses.
*Mrs Hub bought her car back when we were still just dating. In fairness to her, she absolutely needed a DIFFERENT car, but a NEW car, well...that was just stupid. How she got financing, I have no idea. In hindsight, I wish I would have been a little more involved in that decision although at that point we weren't even living together so
*Her car payment is $400/mo. She is open to the idea of selling it to free up that extra $400 each month. The "pay it off today" price of her car is something like 15k, which, since she has put a relatively low amount of miles on it and has kept it clean and in good shape...she might be able to get that much for it, i dunno?
So basically the take away from all of this is Hubs gunna be putting a couple hundred extra dollars into the joint account each month, she will be contributing virtually nothing to the JA and instead virtually all of her income for the next 2 (or hopefully 3)years will go towards paying off her student loans and an accelerated rate, and then once the biggest one is paid off she will continue to aggressively pay off what's left of the 2 outstanding loans. Over this time we will both finish paying our cars off (unless she and/or I sell them first) which will free up extra money, and it's fair to assume that on our current trajectories we should continue to receive yearly pay increases which can be put towards her loans.
Haven't finished crunching the numbers, in part because we have not completed negotiations with the collectors, but I think that, as long as we can both avoid any great misfortune, we should have her debt free in about 10 years.
At which point, Mrs Gooch is probably correct in that she will leave my ass. Marrying poor people...woof.
