I’m a procrastinator. There. I’ve said it. So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, where to start? I haven’t posted since September and haven’t done a Debt Progress roundup since August.

So to cut things short, I’ll combine my September and October Debt Progress into this one post. I will also discuss where I’ve been putting my money since you’ll see that I’ve made less than stellar progress on paying my student loans. Lastly, I’ll discuss my plan for a revision of my monthly debt progress to a monthly net worth progress with the goal of having a bigger picture on my financial state.

So without further ado, I’ll get started on my September and October Debt Progress. For all previous debt progress posts, click here.

As you can see from my debt statement, I finally paid off the last of my 6.21% interest rate loan so now all my loans are < 6% interest rate!

Keep in mind that I’m also on the REPAYE plan so my unsubsidized loan interests are actually halved and my subsidized loans are not accruing any interest until March of 2019.

The not so good news is obviously how long it has taken me to pay it off. If memory serves me right, my goal was to pay it off by August. And the great thing about having this blog is I can refer back to verify so I just confirmed that I indeed wrote in my July debt progress that my goal was to pay off the last of my >6% interest rate loan by August. So I was 2 months behind.

But, better late than never.

In total, I made two payments totaling $2,432.21 in September and October. I warned you, my progress these past few months were not good. That disappointment was part of the reason I procrastinated on creating and posting my debt progress.

*Disregard the random 5 cents and 7 cents payments. I was trying to pay off the last of my 6.21% loan and must’ve over-paid so the extra 12 cents were allocated to those two loans.

Where Did My Money Go?

So if I haven’t been contributing much to loan payments, what did I spend on? I mentioned in my August post, I started contributing to a Roth IRA so I have been contributing $1,000 per month split between $500 payments each paycheck.

I wanted to make sure to contribute ASAP since as we know the stock market just took a turn for the worst. I am well aware of the fact that we cannot time the market, but I figured this would be as good as any time to start contributing, while the market just took a dip from an all-time high.

I also put $2,000 to pay down my credit card. Now, before you yell at me for keeping credit card debt, I will tell you it is still on 0% APR introductory rate till March so I am not accruing any interest. I’ve written an in-depth post on how I use credit cards to save money in the long run HERE if you want to read more about my strategy on using 0% APR introductory rate.

I want to pay down my credit card now, even though I still have months before my 0% APR promo expires because I plan on booking an international trip in the Spring of 2019 and have read all about the perks of travel credit cards that may even get me a free flight. Before I apply for a new card I do want to pay off my credit card balance first.

I have ~$3,000 left on the card and I hope to pay off this debt by end of November and apply for a new travel credit card around December – January. I’ve made it sort of my own rule to pay off all my credit cards before applying for a new credit card even though it is still not accruing interest at all.

Two reasons for this: one, I don’t want to get caught up in credit card debt and two, I want to lower my revolving utilization so when the credit card company checks my credit for a new card, they will more likely approve me and give me a good limit.

Changing My Approach

For the past year and a half, I’ve been using my Debt Progress post to keep myself in check and stay motivated on paying off my student loans.

While this has worked amazingly, allowing me to get out of my six-figure debt, starting January 2019, I will likely be changing my approach. The reason for it is my Debt Progress does not reflect my full financial picture. I have my savings and investments that are not taken into account that I’ve started contributing to since lowering my debt.

A couple months ago I started using Personal Capital to track my net worth. Personal Capital is a financial tool that helps you keep track of your accounts all in one place. At first, I was hesitant about signing up for it since I had already been using Mint for 8 years to track my spending and was very happy with it already. But then I realized that while the two platforms were similar they had their own respective focuses.

While I still find Mint superior when it comes to budget tracking, Personal Capital is better for tracking your overall finances, allowing you to track your investments and net worth easier. If you’re like me and was in a limbo whether to get one or the other or both, check out this comparison.

While it’s not much to look at given the fact that I’m still in negative net worth, Personal Capital gave me the full picture of my financial situation by also tracking my ~$20,000 investments that are never accounted or acknowledge on these debt reports. And while my focus will still be on paying off my student loans, starting 2019 I plan on using this tool to also track my net worth every month. 

Budgeting

Another change that is coming (very soon!) is that I will start creating my own budget from scratch each month.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been inspired by watching the youtube videos by Budget Girl who successfully paid off $33,000 debt in 3 years on an income that started only at $26,000/year by maintaining a budget every month.

I’ve been using Mint for 8 years now and I cannot recommend it enough. But I realize I’ve been passively just looking at my numbers without setting expectations for myself. The good thing about Mint is based on previous months’ spending, the system can adjust your budget accordingly but for me, this led to complacency.

And in full-bearing-my-soul-kind-of-honesty, I don’t know where 100% of my money goes to each month and that scares me. In order for me to plan how much to save, how much I can spend, and how much to put down each month for my student loans, I need to know.

So I’ve decided in addition to tracking my debt progress, I will also start creating my own budget from scratch so watch out for that on my next post.

Goal for November

While I’ve admittedly fallen behind on some of my goals, I still attribute having goals for driving my motivation, so I will continue to set goals for every month. The sad thing is since I’ve procrastinated on posting my debt progress for the last two months, it’s actually mid-November already. So I only have 2 weeks to meet my end of November goal.

The somewhat good part is I really only have one goal for November which is to fully pay off the rest of my ~$3,000 credit card debt.

I know that this means I will have to delay my student loan payments for November if I want to finish paying off the credit card. But that was expected. My strategy with my student loan payment has been to put most of my expenses on my credit card to pay down my highest interest rate student loans ASAP and then pay off my credit card periodically as my balance gets high.

I think this strategy has worked out well so far. I was able to focus on paying off my > 6% interest rate loan at a faster rate by putting most of my expenses on my credit card. Now that it has been paid off, I can shift the focus to paying off the credit card debt. Then, I will go back to paying down my student loans.

And that’s it for my October and November round-up! Hopefully, the holiday season won’t deter me from posting more often.