The mortgage is now officially under $5,000 left to pay it off. It should be $4882.62 plus or minus about 50 cents after this payment of $527. Last month's interest was $27, but it goes down a little each month and I paid it 3 days sooner this month than last so it'll be a little less than that. I should have exact numbers next week some time.

Regardless, it is a great feeling. A huge part of me wants to take half the Emergency Fund and pay it off. I'm not sure how much longer I can resist that. Once the car is gone the only official debt left is the van loan. I say official, because we still owe Mom money, but that is off any record anywhere. I keep thinking of how fast the van loan would go down if we were putting the mortgage money there.

Contract renewals are coming up soon. It has been a few years since DH has gotten a raise, since it has been a few years since contracts were done last. I hope he will get a raise that will at least make up for the higher medical costs and the higher plane ticket costs and if we are lucky the extra taxes they have been taking out since that tax break expired at the start of 2013. It is annoying when your take home pay goes down every year despite your gross staying the same.

Don't get me wrong. I am grateful that DH has a job and a job that pays so well, but I just want to be out of consumer debt and it feels like I am not making very much progress on that front since that tax break expired and took $500 a month away from us that was previously going to pay down debt.

We've been hit hard with medical this year, especially dental. And our medical insurance, Premera, the one that sucks eggs hard, I may have mentioned that before, has decided that they no longer want to pay the rates of any of the anesthesiologists in my county or the next county over, so if any of us need to have any kind of surgery again we have to go all the way to Everett, where none of our doctors work, or they won't pay for that portion.

Now the portion of the anesthetist we have always had to pay for was around $1000. I can't imagine how high it would be without the insurance kicking in for it. Hopefully no one will need surgery any time soon. I miss Aetna, which is bad enough, but it was world's better than Premera.

I've got a $1000 dental bill I'll have to pay off over 3 months and a $307 doctor bill that just came in, none of which is covered under our sky high deductibles. I sometimes really wonder what is the point of medical insurance at all anymore. I remember when it actually paid for stuff. Or we only had to pay a reasonable 20%. This is ridiculous. I miss the insurance DH had with his old company. Now they were excellent.

Okay, time to derail this pity party. I've hit the intersection of Suck it Up and Get Over It, so I shall do that now. For a while anyway.