I set my February debt goal; I'm aiming to pay off at least $1960 of debt. Most of the progress will happen this week, with one last payment at the end of February pushing us over the top.

Thanks to everyone's advice on the past post, I decided that I will throw every bit of debt & savings money at that one student loan (DL) that bugs me so much. I forgot that February will be a bit lighter than usual, but I combined what I have in the Feb. budget and set up a payment of just over $1100 to hit Feb. 1. HOPEfully, since I've sent $145 in the past month and only apparently lowered the balance by $22, this will almost entirely go toward lowering the balance. (Did I mention that the later payment showed up with a date stamp of the day BEFORE the earlier payment that I sent two weeks before? Ugh, whatever.)

I also decided to start up the credit card churn again. In 2011 I earned $3927 in bonuses alone (not counting regular purchase rewards) and in 2012 I got $4000 in bonuses! I don't think I'll come anywhere near those amounts this year, but I'll see what I can do.

First off, I applied all three of us for the Barclays NFL card, and all three of us were approved! This one is a 10K bonus (worth $100 statement credit) after the first purchase. I imagine we'll each need to make one purchase, pay off the card to avoid interest while waiting for the statement credit, and then spend at least $100 more on the card to take advantage of said credit. So maybe 2 purchases each, and we get $300! That should cover a lawyer consultation fee and leave $50 to put toward debt repayment.

Once we finish that, I think we'll apply for the USBank Visa for me and AS (would be our first time) to get $150 for spending $500, and sign NT up for the Bank of America deal where you get $100 for spending $500. That will net us $400 total for the three offers.

Then, I think we'll each try to double-dip the Chase Sapphire deal of spend $3000 get $400. We'll do those one at a time, because depending on whether any unusual expenses come up, it's sometimes a struggle to spend that much in 3 months, especially since we like to keep using our Amex card for groceries for that 6% reward (and now Target RedCard for the 5% discount).

If we do manage to double-dip that one 3 times, we'll net $1200 (plus at least $30 each for regular purchase rewards, so actually $1290).

Not looking forward to the hassle of recordkeeping and bill-paying, but it's a relatively easy way to snowflake that debt, so I'm willing to do it!