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As I recently chronicled, we recently paid off my wife’s car.  The bank mailed the title to us the other day, and reminded us we have a few details left to take care of now that we’re official car owners.  I’m passing along their reminders with a few of my own suggestions & comments mixed in.  For other inspiration, see a similar article written by PT Money when he paid off his car in January.

What To Do After You Pay Off Your Car Loan

The Title

Check your title to make sure a bank representative signed & dated your release of lien. They should have upon mailing it to you, but hey, mistakes happen.  A signed & dated release of lien is satisfactory to transfer a clean title down the road, but if you want the lien completely removed from your title, go to your local county tax office, pay the applicable fees, and order a new title with the lien removed.

Store your title in a safe place. Title can be stolen and forged, so I recommend you don’t keep the title in your car.  Leave it in a protected place, such as your home safe, a locked file cabinet, or a safe deposit box at your local bank.

Insurance Policy

Change the “loss payee” on your insurance policy. When your vehicle’s financed, the lender requires you list them as “loss payee”, which means that if you total your car, any insurance payment for a total loss goes to cover the remaining loan balance first.  When you become the outright owner, you should change this to avoid any miscommunication and hassle with the bank and insurance adjuster should you total your car.  We use Esurance for our auto insurance, so this was easy for us.  I just logged onto my online account, and edited the car information.  In fact, I had forgotten to do this for our other car, so I changed them both on the spot.

While you’re at it, review the rest of your insurance policy. I considered raising my deductible, but decided against it for now.  But I did decide to add roadside assistance to our policy should our cars breakdown.  Both our vehicles are getting along in miles and we have an 80 mile round-trip commute each day.  I figured an extra $10 every six months wasn’t too bad for roadside assistance coverage.

Personal Finance

Snowball your car payment. If you just paid off a typical car loan, odds are your payment was about $400/month.  What will you do with all this extra money each month?  Don’t waste it on frivolous spending.  Be focused & intentional with that extra dough.  Add it to your debt snowball, or continue paying yourself a car payment each month, so you can buy your next car with cash, rather than a cash advance.

Take a minute to celebrate! That’s one less chain in the bondage of debt.  One more link broken on your way to freedom.  Congratulations are in order!  Pat yourself on the back, enjoy a celebratory dinner — whatever works to keep you motivated to continue on the path to financial awareness.

photo by rick

Personal Finance car insurance, car loan, Cars, dave ramsey, debt snowball, loan, snowball, title

We paid off our car!

It is definitely tough economic times out there for everyone, so I wanted to share a bit of positive news on the home front.

While the Lovely Miss H has permanent employment, I have been working in project-based, temporary employment.  The bad news is that it is temporary.  The good news is I can work nearly as many hours as I want.  So the past few months I’ve worked a lot of hours.  I finally figured out how much we had spent compared to our February budget, and the surplus was enough to finish paying off my wife’s car, a 2004 Saab 9-3.  I just logged off of an internet chat with a bank representative confirming we had paid in full, and that the title will be mailed within 10 business days!

Consumer debt is gone

Just want to send a small thank you to Dave Ramsey and his debt snowball methodology.  Yes, there may be mathematical flaws within a particular snowball of debt, but the psychology of “quick wins” in reducing debt cannot be denied, particularly when you’re married and you need two people to consent to a financial plan!

After 26 months, through full employment & layoffs, over-spending & saving, emergencies & good times, our consumer debt is now gone.  We haven’t been the best at paying down our bills, but we remained true to the overall goals & financial principles.

So now you’re rich, right?

No, far from it!  We’ve got so much educational debt, that I think our student loans took out student loans.  A married couple both going through college and grad school without a financial plan will do that to you!

Our next step is to build up an Emergency Fund to a reasonable level.  My car has 185,000 miles on it, hers is over 100,000.  We both commute about 75 miles round-trip each day.  We will need those replaced at some point, so I’d like to be ready with enough money to pay cash for our vehicles.  Now that our vehicles are paid off though, it makes me want to drive my lovely 2000 Nissan Maxima until it dies.  Instead of impressing people with a nice car, I’ll be impressing myself with how long this car can stay around.  This shift in thinking is much easier on the pocketbook.

The Journey Continues

There are always hiccups, bumps, and bruises along the way, but we will enjoy this minor victory, and use it as motivation to keep focused on our long-term goals.

What about you?  Have you had any financial victories or setbacks lately?  Tell me where you are in your journey.

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photo by dreamweaver1619

Personal Finance baby emergency fund, Budget, Cars, consumer debt, dave ramsey, debt, emergency fund, snowball

I read a ton of blogs each week.  So many inspiring stories and wonderful ideas come from the people on the ‘Net.  Here’s a few that caught my eye:

Education

The Wisdom Journal posted 10 Ways College Made Him Rich & 10 Ways College Made Him Poor.  This is a great read for those at or near college age.

The Degerati Life had a guest post by Studenomics on How To Work Full Time While In College.  I wish I would’ve taken some of this advice!

Vehicles

PT @ Prime Time Money paid off his car last week!  Now what does he do? If there’s ca$h burnin’ a hole in your pocket, PT, you can certainly send some dough to my student loan accounts

Clever Dude posted an article on which model automobiles receive the most speeding tickets.

Get Rich Slowly explains to us all why he drives a 13 year old car!  I don’t think I could rock a Geo like that (I’ve got long legs, for one thing), but a fascinating personal finance story and analysis on vehicle expense.

The Big Picture

Christian Personal Finance posted on becoming richer than Rockefeller, and how our standard of living today blows away the richest man in the world’s living standards from 100 years ago.  This is an older post, but I surfed across it this week and thought it was important to share.

That’s it for today, folks.  Enjoy those links.  I’ve got a few news articles that caught my eye, but I’ll probably cover those in posts next week.

Have a great weekend!

photo by brandi666

Links O' The Week Cars, Education, The Big Picture