Getting Excited About My Raise!

I have a raise coming up which should hit my paycheck on December 15th and I'm getting excited about it. Normally I like to budget my planned spending and saving about six months out, but without knowing my upcoming raise, planning becomes difficult.

I decided that for the new year, first, I'm going to increase my retirement contribution to remain in line with my plan to retire early. This will involve increasing my current 401k contribution from 1% to 3% and increasing my Roth IRA conversion to about $600 per month up from $540. This will just get my 2006 Roth IRA fully funded faster before April 15th. For more details on my retirement, see my previous post.

After that, any leftover from my raise will go straight into reducing my student loan/ring debt of about $13,800. I currently pay about $300 to $350 a month on this loan. It sits on a credit card at about 4.99% interest. The minimum payment due is about $215 a month.

So with my raise, I'm going to start throwing a lot more money at this loan (I hope). I'm currently projecting being able to throw an extra $600 a month at this loan which will get it paid off in a little over a year. My new total payment will be somewhere between $900 and $1,000 per month.

I guess what I'm most excited about is the year 2008......when my loan is paid off and I'll have an extra $1,000 a month to do what I want with.