Paying down debt: February 2016

Well I haven't posted monthly progress like I wanted to, but here is an update!
So far we've stayed on track with our plan for how much we pay each month towards each debt. I'm happy to report that we are ahead on our payments, and we are planning to keep it that way.

Many of our debts allow us to "skip" payments if we are already ahead. We unfortunately got into the habit of doing that in 2014 when we had our first son. We had 2 incomes while I was pregnant, and made several hundreds of dollars in extra payments on our debts, but once baby was born our budget fell to the wayside and we didn't have enough at the end of the month to make the debt payments. No big deal since we were ahead, right? And they didn't penalize us for not paying that month, since we were ahead, so we kept saying "We'll pick it back up again next month". But then the next month got rough, and the next and the next, until everything we had paid ahead was used up and we were back to being required to pay the full payment every month. In addition, interest had accrued that entire time, so we ended up being behind. I'm happy to say that we have learned our lesson and won't be falling back into that error again.

So while we are already ahead, we also found that we will have enough money from our tax refund to pay down our most crushing loan by almost 1/5 of the remaining total. In the long run, putting the extra tax refund money towards this loan will save us $250 in interest! I've looked into how much I could get if I invested it into a CD or other type of savings account, and none of them come close to paying us that amount. So as soon as that direct deposit comes in, we'll be paying off a huge chunk of our debt! And then we'll celebrate by making a nice dinner at home instead of spending extra money to eat out :)