Wedding stuff and other updates

We've finally booked in our honeymoon! We're going to Vanuatu for 8 nights! 7 of those nights are at a beautiful resort called Iririki Island, and then we're spending a night on Tanna Island and doing a volcano tour, before flying back to Australia - although we're not going straight home, we're going to spend another 4 nights on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland! I can't wait... we're not spending as much as we thought we were going to, which is a massive bonus, some things ended up being cheaper than I thought they would be.

We've paid off quite a bit on wedding stuff, but still have about $15,000 to save in 5 months... there's only 4 pay-cheques for myself between now and the wedding which makes it a bit tough, meaning we pretty much need to save my entire wage, but I know we can do it - we've saved almost $15k already!

I'm going to ask Mr M to pull his belt in a bit tighter - we've really slipped lately and I looked at our spending the past few weeks and we're averaging $400 a week in "general" spending. So, not essential spending, like groceries or bills, I'm talking about 100% non-essential spending... dinners out, movies, lunches, wii games etc... not great. Really bad, in fact.

I'm going to up our "allowance" to $100 each a week but I'm going to be a lot more strict about it. I'm really determined to make our money worth more... Do you know, we've paid $55,000 towards our mortgage since we moved in, but the actual reduction in principle is only $10,000. Wow. Pretty heart breaking really...

I was also devastated to receive my HECS (equivalent to a Student Loan) statement the other day and see that even tho I paid $3400 in the last financial year my total debt only reduced by $2000. I feel like this is a debt I'll never repay, and I don't even include in our "debt" statement because I've always considered it unimportant as I automatically pay it like tax, so it means so little...but when I saw that statement I realised I'm going to have to start paying extra towards it otherwise it'll never be gone!! At this rate, it will take me about 15 years to pay it back, and that's 15 years of working - what happens when I stop working to have children?? God, I don't want to think about. But one thing I should consider is that every voluntary repayment I make over $500 actually reduces my debt by an extra 10%.... So if I make a voluntary repayment of $1000, my debt will actually reduce by $1100.... there's some incentive for me!

Once the wedding is over, at the beginning of 2010 I will put together a new debt statement that will include my HECS debt. The only way to ensure I am fully focused and dedicated to eliminating my debt is to be really honest about how much I've got!!! I'll also have to rethink my long term goals... I wanted to pay my car off next year, but with our plans to go to europe and now that I want to include payments towards my HECS debt, it might not happen, but I will definitely make sure I keep making extra repayments towards the car!

I know a lot of you would be wondering why we're having long honeymoon or planning to go to europe whilst we have so much consumer debt, and I suppose the answer is time... we've got the rest of our lives to repay debt but only a couple of years of opportunity to travel. We've solemnly sworn that we will not accrue any extra debt by travelling - it has to be money we've saved up and above our debt repayments. It's not the ideal situation to be in, but it's the one we've chosen, and we are happy with this decision.