December 14, 2014

And We’re Back! ($92,628)

At last! After almost two months, the refund of my credit balance has been issued. I haven’t actually gotten it yet, but at least my accounts are no longer completely wonky. This looks like about $2,000 of progress since I was last posting it regularly? It’s really hard to tell for me now. When I wasn’t paying a mortgage, I didn’t ever have huge outflows from my accounts, except for my loan payments, which were mostly offset in the net worth calculation by debt reduction.

As soon as the new year hits, I should be able to file for a homestead exemption on my property taxes. If this lowers my mortgage payment (by about $100) I’m not sure if I should take the extra money and put it towards my loans, or to continue putting it on my mortgage (my highest interest rate!) After five payments, I’ve paid off $1,250 of principal — a little depressing, but by paying an extra $40 and change a month, my final payment is now $25. After the next payment, I’ll have cut that last month out completely, and every five payments will likely knock off another month. For now the extra I’m paying isn’t too much, and hasn’t been making too much of an impact, but as the principal slowly goes down, it should make more and more of an impact.

November 22, 2014

Cookies! (And Some Things That Are Harder to Swallow)*

One of my friend is having a spa party/cookie swap in three weeks, so I’m planning on doing some test baking today. I actually like cooking and baking, though I can say there’s a whole lot that I’m particularly good at (hence the testing). I saw two really interesting sounding recipes — both of which used a box mix. That’s just cheating. I’m all about that when it comes to brownies and muffins — I guess I just have higher standards for online recipes.

I’m officially $200+ over budget for the month, with at least $50 more to spend in groceries (including our post-Thanksgiving turkey). I feel like I’ve said this repeatedly, but I cannot WAIT for bonus/tax return time.

My inability to spend less than I earn (after designated savings) has been getting pretty disheartening, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where my monetary priorities are. My mortgage is now the highest interest rate I’m paying (very high for a mortgage these days), so maybe that should be my priority to pay down, so I can refinance. But will I be able to do this while rates are still low? Would I be way more likely to accomplish that (or my debt payoff goals generally) if I just don’t have a wedding, or have just a small thing? The way I see it, it ‘s going to be 25 people, or 125 people — I can cut it down to immediately family and best friends, not do a wedding party, just do a dinner, but then I’ll miss out on the dancing and sharing the time with a lot of my other friends. But if I do something larger, it’s really hard to make the determination of who I want to invite and who I don’t. Or more accurately “If I invite X, I should also invite Y” and “Well she invited me to her wedding five years ago, but we don’t really talk much now…but I wish we did, and I want her to know that.” My wonderful man, god bless him, says “I’ll just invite less people, so you can invite more.” Which is incredibly sweet, but I know I should be making some cuts on the amorphous guest list in my head.

There will be some decisions ahead to be made. But for today at least I will limit my decision making to: Caramel Pecan Snickerdoodle OR Red Velvet Cheesecake? OR Oatmeal Chocolate Chip OR S’mores Cookie Bars. OR ALL OF THEM?

* I feel like a lot of my posts are negative lately. So I figured I’d share something happy. I’ve paid $735 in student loan principal this month! And in 2015, I’m hopeful that we can put another $500 or so a month to either loans or the mortgage (or the wedding), depending on what we decide.

October 14, 2014

Debt Progress – September/October 2014 ($95,596)+

I’m thinking I’ve been neglecting my Debt Progress posts in the last few months. Then I realized I’ve only ever posted ONE of these bad boys. Well, tonight is the night we fix that!

You see that magical $100,000 line! That’s right, I’m below it!

Now I only recently celebrated being under $100,000 in a blog post. That’s because the federal loan number that feeds into Mint doesn’t show interest, which could get to about $400 or something equally ridiculous each month, so I was really see-sawing above and below the $100K mark. But now I’d say we’re under for good. Debt also includes whatever credit card balance I had at the time, which I pay off every two weeks or so. THAT SHOULDN’T COUNT MINT!*

I’ve realized I can do a bar graph of my individual loan balances against the same time last year. Once I figure out an efficient way to hide account number information I’ll probably add those in to these posts. I can see a couple thousand dollars of progress in some individual loans, as well as seeing $0 where there used to be balances.

As promised in previous posts this and last month, my Federal loans are getting refinanced today (and it does look like my $200 payment went through before my refinance loan was disbursed), so hopefully in the next few months I’ll be able to see further reductions (from paying basically the same amount).

Lastly, we’ve been putting all of our collected rent money into a separate account which I have not fed into Mint. This is intended to be a bit of a house buffer fund. We’re going to use a chunk of what we have so far for a project we knew we’d need to do when we bought the house, which I expect will happen this month. Then we’ll probably put in the rent checks from this month (due on the 15th), November and December into the account. After that, we will probably put this money toward my student loans–at least until we have to use some of the money for house things and need to replenish it again.

* Sorry about that mini-tantrum.
+ I had a small freak out about my net worth being -95. I think this is because a $750 credit card payment is reflecting as out of my bank account, but hasn’t reflected as paid on the credit card yet. It should really be in the high 94s, which is more tolerable, though still not great.

October 9, 2014

September Budget Recap ($94,562)

Let me tell you…I did pretty damn great through 90% of September. Then it all went to shit. But I did say I would try to get back into posting more, so here I am, the Prodigal Blogger, returning home to confess my sins.

I’ve said it before–so sorry for sounding like a broken record–but I HATE that my budget tracker doesn’t account for the fact that certain bills are paid at certain times of the month. I’ve spent about 2/3 of my October budget, and it’s currently the 8th. But I’ve also received my two planned for paychecks for the month, and I’m anxious to reduce my principal as soon into the month as possible. Pretty much the only month bills I haven’t paid yet are automatic payments that I can’t change.

Anyway, a digression, per usual. September Budget!

These are the categories where I went over budget.

Food: There are two reasons why this is over budget. Reason #1: I just noticed a Cumberland Farms purchase for $27 in here. This is likely for gas, and not for groceries, though I have been known to buy the occasional milk and eggs at Cumby’s which is how I’m guessing it got miscategorized. I’ve been seeing a bit of funky stuff with the categorization lately. Reason #2: $97 at a restaurant in NY, when we went to go visit my sister- and brother-in-law. We stayed at their house and ate their food, so I thought it would be appropriate to thank them by buying dinner. No regrets.

The Fast Food Part: This is largely buying snacks and/or chocolate milk at the cafeteria at work. I need to work on this. I have this budget for lunches at work, but it’s intended to only cover meeting a friend for lunch, and not being too lazy to pack my lunch.*

Utilities: Real talk: I have no idea how much utilities cost. I haven’t had to pay them in two and a half years, and when I did have to pay them, I didn’t have to pay for things like a water bill or the sewage commission. Whatever those things are. So those are less expected for me. I’ve since adjusted this category up to a more realistic $200. My cable and internet bill, as well as my cell phone, are not included in this category. Yes, in addition to Netflix, I also pay for cable. I blame the Bruins on this one. Bad personal finance blogger. Bad.

But anyway, in getting internet, we had to get the compatible cable modem thing (I have no idea if it’s a modem or router or what?). We could rent it for $10 a month, or pay around $100 for it. Seeing as we signed up for a two year contract, buying it outright seemed the way to go. So that gets put on our bill in three installments, the last of which is this month. So my cable bill should go down slightly next month to partially counteract the rest of my expensive utilities.

Entertainment: This is the usual Netflix $8, and I bought tickets to a show that a friend from school is performing in. I bought the tickets for the four of us, so I should actually get $75-100 of this back.

Everything Else: I feel like this should be further broken down someone, but here are the biggies:

$86 – bought flowers for the ladies I used to live with (which I’m not positive they even knew were from me as I got no acknowledgment that I sent them. Kinda really annoying).

$376 – wedding dress. This shouldn’t count, because I transferred money over, and didn’t take it out of the money I made during the month. But I still spent it. Bonus: I had some kind of PayPal balance that covered $15 of the dress. Thanks mystery shopping!

$78 – paint from Sherwin Williams and some screws from Lowe’s — to put on my new license plate.

$23 – said new license plate/DMV fees.

I also took about $100 out of the ATM this month. Most of which is actually still in my purse. Some of my coworkers took me out to lunch the day before the man and I made things legal. I brought money with me so I could at least offer to buy my own lunch–but the company did so I didn’t even need to offer/feel bad that my coworkers were buying me lunch.

Those are the biggies. There’s also $20 here or there (CVS, HomeGoods), but I’ve yet to buy anything too outlandish shopping-wise.

Looking forward (to now?) October is a weird month because I get an extra paycheck. So this will mean an extra loan payment or two, and possibly a puppy, which will mean adoption fees and probably some pretty big vet bills (particular if the lady we get is too young to be spayed already), but the extra check means I’m ready for it. It will just look like I spent stupid amounts this month. I also have to pay bar fees and get my hair did.

That’s all I have for this evening, but I really like re-capping, because it forces me to see the mistakes I made in the prior month, in the hopes that I won’t immediately repeat them (and, more so recently, it helps me see that I’m being unrealistic about some things). I’ll look to post a debt progress update in the next few days.

* Sometimes this actually means not having lunch food in the house. Laziness does not come into play too often anymore as the man usually makes my lunch for me in the morning. 🙂

October 8, 2014

Asterisks ($94,194)

I have an event saved in my iPhone calendar this month, that consists solely of ******. I think this was intended to be my payoff date for all of my undergraduate loans. This would have been in addition to paying an extra $500 on my highest interest loans (the federal loans). But alas, leaving the second job and the resultant moving/buying a house have resulted in other plans.

BUT that doesn’t mean I haven’t made some progress. I input another $200 payment to my federal loans which hopefully will go through today/before my payoff loan is disbursed. Essentially I didn’t want the interest I currently have on the loans to get capitalized in, but I’m not sure if my attempted payment will get in first. AND the balance on UG3 is about $300, which I can definitely pay off with the additional paycheck this month.

I’ve apparently been tracking the amount of interest paid for a while — it does not seem like long ago that I figured out a way to set that up, but I guess time flies when you’re having fun.

The numbers don’t seem to have changed all that much since January — either around $475 or $520, and I think the fluctuation really has more to do with the day of the month I made a payment (or number of days in the month), than a real change. Next month however (or actually, maybe this month) I’m expecting my interest payment to be closer to low $400s. I’ll take the extra $75 a month towards principal, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve been seriously slacking on the posting. Blame the fact that I no longer live alone. But I’m hoping to get back in the swing of things in the next few weeks, with budget posts (ummm I’m bad at sticking to the budget), goals for the rest of the year and for next year, and getting back into posting monthly recaps. I’m also hoping to give an idea of what I think my “true” net worth is — accounting for the house/mortgage, 401(k), HSA and house savings. To be continued.

September 24, 2014

Jumping in! ($94,373)

I gave a call to the bank on my potential student loan refinance, because I got conflicting emails. Turns out, when they initially entered my monthly mortgage payment into their system, they added an extra digit somewhere, resulting in a $13,000 monthly payment. I now understand why they wanted a cosigner!
But they confirmed that it was fixed and requested some documentation, which was easy to produce (paystub, current loan statement). I checked the status today and not only was I approved, but I was approved for the lowest possible interest rate! I will now have to pay $558 as my monthly payment, instead of $501, but I’ll be moving from an interest rate of 6.625% to 4.74% (after the .25 reduction for setting up automatic payments, which I did).
Too much text. Let’s see some screenshots of what this gets us:

Paying $575 (rounding up my minimum) at my old rate:

Paying $575 at my shiny new interest rate:

Paid off a year and a half earlier with a whopping $8,519 in total interest saved! And this is without any additional snowballing to the loan to pay it off earlier.

My original intent was to pay of my undergraduate loans (3.25% – with a cosigner), then decide between attempting to pay off my higher interest federal loans (6.625%) or my “law school loans” (5%). Now that my “federal” loans are at a lower interest rate I think it makes sense to hit them in the following order:

UG3: $537.28 (Projected November 2014)

UG4: $3,131.99 (Projected March 2014/bonus time?)

UG5: $4,646.23 (I can’t predict the future here)

Perkins Loan: $6,387.96

Law School Loan: $13,683.27

“Federal Loan”: $70,300 (ish)

I will also pay off any remaining balance on my federal loan (interest accruing before the refinance payment comes through) next month. I’m happy that all of the smaller chunks in the “law school loans” category will now be at higher interest rates than the big daddy federal loan, so that eventually/$28,000 from now, I’ll only have one loan open!

September 20, 2014

The Most Un-Romantic Blog Post You Will Ever Read ($93,724)

I got married last Friday. That was our plan BEFORE we got engaged — hence my extreme surprise when a ring was presented to me. My boyfriend/fiance/hubby (I’m never really sure what to call him) is currently a student, and we bought our two-family house together. I wanted to ensure that I could put him on my benefits, because I wasn’t sure if his having an income would affect his insurance eligibility, and I’d rather not have to scramble if he were to find out that he now has to pay a huge amount.

But insurance benefits aren’t the main reason we got married this year. Tax benefits are. Getting married this year instead of next year means about $6,000 less in tax liability. That’s a lot of money when you’re planning a wedding/bought a house/paying off debt. So we got legally married for about $150 in marriage license and officiant costs. We don’t really consider ourselves married for any purpose other than taxes and benefits, and we purposely planned to do it on the same day as our wedding celebration next year (only one anniversary to remember).

While updating my benefits, I also updated a few more things. I decided to change my withholding to married, which will lower my tax refund, but will mean more money in my pocket now. Offsetting this, I increased my HSA contribution. I’m hoping that I am able to make a lump sum contribution to the HSA around bonus time next year, so that we can get LASIK for my man–I had it about six years ago (is it really possible that it was that long ago?!) and it was some of the best money I ever spent. I mean, I financed it, and that wasn’t wise, but otherwise it was definitely worth the cost.

I also increased my 401(k) a percentage point. I’m now contributing 8% of my salary. I would like to do more, and I have it set up to automatically increase a percentage point each year, around what I think is raise time. Ideally I’d like to be contributing 15% (or really the annual maximum) to make up for the amount of time I contributed nothing towards retirement. The lovely website recommends saving 10-15% of salary each year, which I assume is geared toward helping you maintain your existing level of comfort in retirement. The good news is, I certainly don’t spend money (on housing, food, etc.) like someone who makes my salary–because I’m sending $1,000 a month in student loans. So really, I’m living like someone who makes at least $15,000 less annually. This makes me feel a little bit better, but as soon as those loans are paid off, I want to ensure I’m contributing at least 15%. Hopefully it doesn’t take me 15 years to get there.

June 12, 2014

A Measly $2,000 ($91,136)

This is what’s standing in between me and five figures of student loan debt (vs. the current six figure number). It wasn’t so long ago that $2,000 would be not even remotely considered “measly” and it obviously still isn’t (because if it were, I’d be in the five figures.

But it wasn’t so long ago (January!) that my net worth was in the negative sixes, and I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress since then (to be shortly eradicated by my down payment). And I haven’t been counting the $3,399 – $4,594 that’s in my 401(k) (my contributions to date vs. including employer contributions, which have gained $150 since I started investing in it in January. Why had I not been investing this whole time?

Anyways, to complete my circle of digressions, it looks like closing will be on the 26th–exactly two days after our originally scheduled date (tomorrow). I almost burst into tears on the phone with man friend this morning, thinking about the move. He goes away for a week two to three days after the closing, so this gives us no time to paint or do anything to the place, and I have to figure out coordinating moving after he comes back (which involves moving all of my stuff out of my current apartment beforehand). I’m getting upset thinking about it, so I won’t write any further about the logistics now. Because we’re closing two weeks later, it means we’ll be out of pocket a lot less up-front interest, and I’ll have received an extra paycheck before we close. As a result, if I do get a final final paycheck from job 2 on June 30 (which would be $1,350), I’m going to pay off UG3, and maybe throw an extra hundred or two at my federal loans. I hate that they are the largest and have the highest interest rate, and the more I make small payments, the lower my daily interest amount will be. If I dip just under the six figure mark, days later interest will bring me back up again, and on those accounts that could keep on for five months. No thanks.

Sorry this isn’t very coherent today–I just haven’t been terribly coherent lately, but hopefully things will be completely settled by this time next month.

June 5, 2014

Freaking Out! ($90,938)

There are two distinct issues that will likely prevent us from closing on our house next week. One is on our side, the other is on the seller’s end. I can do absolutely nothing about either one of these things, except perhaps beg for the requirement to be waived. Essentially my boyfriend’s tax return hasn’t been fully processed, because of potential self-employment tax that he owes. I think he essentially over-reported income, but because he did they think he owes tax. The amount he owes will be less than the amount his refund was estimated to be, so he actually owes nothing but until the IRS sorts it out we’re kind of in limbo. Any advice of how to get them to process things quicker? We sent them in the schedules they were looking for, and will amend it later, but just wanted to give them exactly what they asked for as soon as possible, in order to expedite the process to the extent possible–but I don’t know if it will help. It’s extremely frustrating to be so powerless.

Topping that off, I emailed my second job/current living situation, to tell them we might be delayed in closing, and when did they need me out by, since I wasn’t sure I was going to make my original target of June 30. They tell me that they were actually hoping I’d be out before the end of the month. So now I’m closing later and moving out earlier. This does not bode well for painting inside the house, etc. before we actually move in (if it happens at all at this point). The good news is it sounds like I’m still getting paid for the month of June, which I wasn’t positive on, and therefore wasn’t banking on.

So I don’t have a definitive date of when my apartment needs to be vacated, but it is likely that I’ll be storing a good portion of my furniture and belongings in other parts of the house, so they can get started on renovations in the apartment–which is going to be totally nicer after I leave. My replacement is getting a washer/dryer in the apartment! So I don’t have much time to pack, which is compounded by the fact that I am only home for two hours a day on weekdays. I don’t think I’ll be able to take any time off this week, so I’ll be looking at a busy weekend of packing, and likely a day off the week after.

So I’m basically freaking out.

May 28, 2014

Moving Forward ($94,105)

We’re moving forward slowly but surely with the house stuff. We’re experiencing some issues with our 2013 taxes–the IRS hasn’t processed both of ours yet, which is making me nervous, but it’s not so late in the tax season that we can contact them about it. So we wait in frustration.

I’ve been dealing with some house/family issues, but the number one thing that I’m thankful for is that my boyfriend and I are on the same page. We’re on the same page with spending money, and paying down debt which is awesome. It’s definitely helpful to have someone who sees things from the same perspective as you, and agrees with you that’s it’s not reasonable to get a loan to fix some (purely cosmetic) things–not everyone feels this way. But, realizing that a large chunk of cash is going to go away in less than three weeks (this Friday will be my last second paycheck, and my last paychecks before closing!), my net worth has increased almost $10,000 since December 2013 and, excluding the mortgage, should hopefully stay above negative six figures. I won’t be seeing this change by $2000+ a month anymore, now that I’m no longer getting the extra paycheck, and having to pay a mortgage, but we’ll get there slowly but surely.

I need to catch up on my budget/spending recap posts in the next week or so, and I don’t think my weekends are going to be any less busy with the house purchase. I hope that post-move I’ll get better at posting on a regular basis, and I’m sure I’ll have more expenses to discuss, and all kinds of budget changes to deal with. I also hope to update my goals–which might have been doable if I had been able to keep up this living situation for another year, but the housing gods had other plans. Until then…

	Double Debt Single W… on Long Overdue Updates
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	dbl04b on Finding Milestones ($25,775)
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