The other night I went on to the university site because I'd gotten second notice that my password was expiring. I didn't expect NT's summer class tuition to have been billed yet, but there it was. It's not due for ages, of course, but I figured, I've got the money to pay it now, so why not? Plus, since I can subtract it from our "estimated future debt," it would count toward our April debt goal, which I'd given up hope of reaching.

Tuition and fees were $2005, so that takes us to $2826 of debt paid for April, surpassing our $2000 goal!

When I entered that into our debt spreadsheet, I saw that it will now take less than 20 years to pay off our student loan debt at our current rate, and less than 37 months if we pay $1000 extra per month! So if we paid that amount extra, we'd be out of debt (except our mortgages) in May 2015.

The bad news is, with our reduced income due to parental leave, we won't be paying that much extra again until August. Still, if we manage the $1000-extra every month from then on, we could be debt-free except for mortgages by September 2015! And I'm not ruling out future windfalls; even though I don't know of any on the horizon, we've had lots of nice surprises over the past couple years. It would be amazing if we could accelerate our repayment even more and be out of student loan debt by the end of 2014. But I can live with 2015.

We do have money in our travel budget over the next few months that I could put toward debt, but I've decided to try and coax all my sisters and nieces out for a visit this summer by offering to pay their airfare and maybe for their hotels. (They all have more kids and fewer incomes, so I know I'm better off.) I was already going to put out the offer, but didn't care too much whether they accepted. Since my mom's health scare, though, I've gotten very family-minded all of a sudden. So I'm really going to work on them to try and get them out here.

NT said yesterday that he would really like to do a weekend at a rental cabin this year, since we aren't having any proper family trips (no vacation time due to parental leave). So I'm also going to leave money aside for that.

Oh, and thanks for those who asked about my mom. She seems to be doing better; I actually think her color is better than the last time I saw her, so the stent has done wonders for her blood flow. She's still weak and sedentary, but then she always has been. I'm a bit concerned that she doesn't have a diet or physical therapy regimen in place. But she's a very stubborn person deep-down, so I bet she'd resist it anyway.

Right now I'm trying to think how to help my dad out with the house. It's very messy (mom's a hoarder) and though my dad does the basics of laundry, dishes and keeping the floors clear of junk so there are safe walkways, I noticed a lot of grime and some cockroaches. I talked to him about hiring a cleaner and he was interested, but of course they couldn't really do a cleanup of my mom's clutter, because it would be very upsetting to her and not good for her heart. So I want to reach out to a few Virginia cleaning companies to see if there would be someone willing to ignore the hoarding aspect, for the most part, and just do what they could cleaning the surfaces that are visible. The kitchen and bathrooms are my main concerns. But also the living room carpet is a few shades darker than when they bought it!

Anyway, got to think about that some more. My mom is very resistant to change, so it would have to be handled with kid gloves. But I don't think it's realistic for my 82-year-old dad, who still works nearly full-time, to try and do all the housework AND take care of my basically helpless mother.