Scariest Thing You Will Ever Read

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday (HALLOWEEN!!!), I decided I needed to scare some sense into myself and my husband.  There is no time like the present for a little reality check.  Since beginning our debt snowball, our initial goal has been to pay off our credit card debt first.  Because we have only been focusing on our credit card debt I sometimes forget the magnitude of our student loan debt.  Which BTWs grows every month like crazy.  In YNAB I have the totals of our debt in "off-budget" accounts.  I keep it simple and don't have interest accruing in the account or anything like that.  Instead I just update the new totals owed every month or so when I check the online accounts for them all (currently we are not paying any of my student loans and just paying minimum on my husbands while we work on our credit cards).  Anywho, with the massive amount of student loan debt we have (approximately $470,000), I thought it would be a good idea to know how much interest is actually accruing on this on a daily basis.

Hubby to the rescue!  The idea of calculating all those interest rates made me throw-up in my mouth a little bit....but my MBA husband was actually intrigued with this project and did all the math for me!  Yay for businessy husbands!  (I'm more of a hands-on type of person...you need a breathing tube placed in your trachea or a 14 gauge IV in your antecubital fossa...gimme a call).

Drum roll please..........

$95

per day. 
in interest. 
on all of our debt.*

Are you kidding me?!?! A freaking hundred dollars a day JUST in interest?!?!?!

OMG....if that doesn't scare you people, I dunno what will.  Let's do more math to scare us...

$3000 a month. 
JUST in interest!

 or

$36,000 a year. 
JUST in interest!!

That is almost half of our net income a year, aka one of our salaries after taxes are taken out!  Let's remind ourselves here that even if we paid this yearly we still would not be paying down one penny of the debt...just keeping it stagnant.


Ok, on that note I'm going to bed to cry myself asleep.  Somehow I will figure out a way to remind us of this interest on a daily basis....maybe it needs to go on the chalkboard above our debt payoff thermometer.  Hopefully I made you all feel better about your own financial situations...or maybe you are in the same little dingy with holes with us and we are all sinking to our death until we start making some serious progress.

*This includes the credit card debt...which is almost insignificant when pooled with the student loan interest.  It is also an estimate and in reality it should probably be a little higher due to quarterly compounding of the interest.