May 2010 is a realistic date for being credit card debt free. As of April, we will have racked back up to 20k (paying no interest but still). *Sigh*

I am glad we have the house, but all the repairs will have set us back a whole year. It doesn't help that everyone is running deals right now in order to get business or that I have no patience.

The only remaining projects in the house are the roof and the furnace. Everything else (and I do mean everything that isn't a gut and rebuild) has been dealt with now. The roof and the furnace both should last at least 4 more years but I will be keeping an eye on them.

I want to get to the point where we are saving up the money and then spending it instead of doing the 0% deals but I suppose I will at least celebrate the victory of not having paid interest on debt in the past year or even in the future year.

At least I don't spend as frivolously as in the past.

That said, here are my goals. I want to get credit card debt free, I want to be maxing out our retirement accounts (at least this has been improving over time), I want to save at least 10% in our emergency fund/long term savings and I want to save 10% for our short term savings (vacations, things or projects that come up, etc).

I think I have a much better chance of reaching these goals from this point forward because I finally have a handle on the splurge money and the house repairs (both of which kept us running over, though to be fair, the house was the biggest issue). That May 2010 date will be reached with full employment and full splurge and house repair levels so it seems highly likely though not guaranteed.

For the EF, I am thinking a year of expenses keeping in mind the potential for needing to fix things should be good but I will have to mull that over. That would be ~41k. So probably 2 years to build that but probably 4 instead so that we can max the retirement at the same time. Definitely something I will be replanning when the debt is gone.