I am counting on DebtGoal

[cheryl_grier]

Hi,

Ny name is Cheryl and I am a newbie to debtgoal. I am weighed down by my debt (student Loans) and I really want to be able to stop living paycheck to paycheck and be able to be independent and not dependent. I really think going with the snowball plan will work better for me because I will see the results alot sooner.

Any thoughts on this.

I have set up everything that I want included. Did not include that new car because I can manage that. It's just those little nagging bills that you keep finding. I want to be able to be credit worthy again. I have already run into a problem. I cannot pay my schools loans for august.

I am thinking that I have to tweak my plan. Any thoughts?

Also, If your accounts are not linked to well known names ie banks, how will you know that your balances are going down?

[ThriftyMan]

Hi Cheryl

Congratulations on making the decision to put debt behind you. I'm sure that as you do, you'll feel the relief of having more financial security and also the surprise that you can actually afford to do more with your financial life when you're not paying interest. It doesn't mean you sacrifice what you want, in fact you can do more when you don't have debts.

You ask a lot of good questions. Let me deal with them one at a time.

First: we can connect to over 12000 different financial institutions, but we obviously don't get them all. If you can't link to your account online, you can just track it manually by entering a few fields from your statement. If you're updating an account manually, the balance changes whenever you enter new information about that account from a statement.

Second, if you have a lot of little debts you're right. The snowball plan can be a great option for getting some of the smaller ones paid off and out of the way.

Third: if you can't pay your school loans for August, you'll have to tweak your plan. but you may need to tweak in a big way. Here's one thought:

On school loans, you can often as for forbearance. They'll let you skip a few months of payments. Usually this is a really bad idea because interest accrues and most people aren't in a better position to pay a few months down the road than they are today. But sometimes you can use this to your advantage. If you have really high APR credit card interest loans that you can pay off you could try to pay off some credit card debt. That might free up some cash that you could then use to pay off your student debt.

I can give you some better ideas if you'll tell me a bit more about the situation.