The Whole Messy Story

Okay, so sometime last month, the car broke down. It's our only car--a Saturn SL1.

I purchased it--well, August will make three years. It was five years old, and it had only 24,000 miles on it.

I financed it for five years at 11%. This was a mistake I will never make again. Actually, I hope to never finance a car again, but even if I do, it will not be for five years. As my Dad correctly pointed out at the time I bought it, my little daughter, who was not yet one, would be in kindergarten before this thing was paid off.

Anyway, I put a lot of miles on it driving for work. Last month, I brought it up over the 100,000 mile mark. Although I try to be real, real good to it, I had the proverbial "bad feeling."

Sure enough, one morning as I was driving to work, the thing overheated. I pulled into the WalMart station to check my fluid levels and see what was going on. My radiator exploded a dark, thick goo all over my engine that looked like something Nickelodeon would sell to kids.

Turns out oil was leaking back into the radiator. A big mess. A big mess that's kept me from having the car for several weeks, and backwards in my debt payback plan to the tune of about $2,500. That's about equal to the amount I still owe on the car.

I'm taking a week's pay in lieu of vacation to help me pay for a chunk of that--I'd been planning to do that to pay off some of the debt anyways--and will shift some of my dramatic paydown money and my mileage checks into paying that off in a few months.

In all, this means I'm about three months behind, now, in my debt pay-off plan, which was already about six months too slow to get me out of debt by the end of the year.

What will happen, true believers? Will the 365 day turnaround be forced to become a 780 day turnaround? Will this debt-free thing ever happen?

Stay tuned to see how we get ourselves back on track!