Welcome to my November 2018 student loan debt progress! If you are new here, every month, I post the progress I’ve made on paying off my student loans. I do this to hold myself accountable and to share my debt progress with others who are also facing debt payments of their own.

Debt paid this month: $1,500

Debt remaining: $92,796

I also house every month’s debt progress from the very beginning here if you want to check out the progress so far.

November was rough. I saw the stock market continue to slide which was a sad predicament as I just started loosening up on the debt payments to start investing a few months ago. That and the fact that the market had been doing so well for the past several years makes me scared that we’re due for a huge correction.

But what can I do? I’m just holding tight and taking it in stride.

Change of Plans

Debt-wise, I only contributed $1,500 despite this month being a 3-paycheck month. So what happened? Well, I’m a glass half full kind of girl so I saw the market downturn as a $ale. Therefore I continued to put down $1,000 to my Roth IRA hoping to max it out this year.

Also, per last month’s goal, I spent the majority of my take-home pay paying down my credit card bill (still on 0% APR) because I wanted to get rid of that debt before I applied for a new credit card.

The reason I wanted the new credit card was to get bonus points for travel mileage since I’m planning an international trip in 2019. But I changed my mind.

I didn’t think it was a good time to get a new card yet since I can still take advantage of my 0% APR credit card for 4 more months and the bonus points required me to spend over my budget for the next 3 months so it really wasn’t worth going over budget just to chase some points.

But no regrets. I’d have to pay down my credit card in the future anyways so might as well do it now. The only repercussion is my suffering student debt payments. I’ve been stuck in the $90k’s since July, paying down only $6,000 total since then, so not good.

Budgeting

As mentioned in last month’s debt progress, I am creating my first ever budget starting this month. Wait, what? My first budget? Well let’s backtrack a little, shall we?

I’ve been budgeting since I was 18, but I’ve never actually created my own budget. 

I’ve been using Mint which is a financial tool to keep track of my financial accounts and spending in one place for 8 years now and I cannot recommend it enough. I’ve even written a mini love confession about Mint in this post.

The great thing about Mint is based on previous months’ spending, the system can adjust your budget and I’ve mostly been relying on that to let my budget fall into place.

But I realize I’ve been passively just looking at my numbers without setting expectations for myself. And quite frankly, without setting my own budget, I feel like I’m lacking a sense of accountability.

For the most part, I know that I spend ~$500/month on variable expenses. Rent and loan payment to my parents costs me $1000 so my monthly spending is  ~$1,500 not including loans payments and saving contributions.

But I’ve been very passive these last few months, as you’ve seen in my less than stellar debt progress the last couple of months. I also had the dark realization that I don’t quite know where all my money is going each month.

So I decided to look through my past 6 months spending through Mint to create my own budget based on scratch.

I’ve divided my budget into 4 sections: fixed spending, variable spending, savings/investments, and loan payments. I also added a section called “Other” just for one-time or rare expenses that are not going to be part of my budget every month.

Let’s go through a breakdown of each section.

Fixed Spending

The first section, fixed spending is the easiest. I only have 4 items listed in this category.

1. Rent: I still live at home but pay $500 in rent to my parents.

2. Loan to parents: My parents helped pay for my college/graduate school to lessen the burden of student loans so I pay them back $500/month. This is separate from the regular student loans that I pay to my loan servicer.

3. Cell phone bill: I used to pay $56/month for my line + installment plan for my phone but just got a new phone and my bill credit hasn’t been completely processed yet so this is still tentative. But based on what I signed for, it should increase my monthly bill to no more than $60/month.

 4. Since I live at home, utilities and TV subscription are covered by my parents. My contribution to TV subscription is $7.99 (rounded up to $8) for Netlifx every month.

Variable Spending

Variable spending was quite a hard category to create. I tried looking through my past 6 months history on Mint to gauge my spending but they vary quite a bit so here’s my stab at it.

1. Gas: The last 6 months I’ve averaged $120 in gas spending and this coincides with the time period since I’ve been at my new job so this should be a fairly stable spending. Happy to say I was under-budget this month. My mom filled my gas one day when she had to borrow my car hence why it’s so under-budget.

Under-budget: +$53

2. Entertainment: Entertainment was a hard category to put a set amount for because I usually mix entertainment with dining/drinking out. Most of my entertainment with friends usually involves going out to restaurants/bars so I don’t expect pure entertainment category to be high so I only budgeted $30/month.

Over-budget: -$43.65

 3. Dining/drinking out: I decided on one category for restaurants/fast food/bars/coffee just to keep things simple. As I mentioned, most of my entertainment with friends come from dining/drinking out so I budgeted $200/month but keep in mind that is goes hand in hand with entertainment as well.

Under-budget: +$53

 4. Groceries: Since I live at home, my grocery bills are pretty low. Sometimes I will stop by to get the occasional household products so groceries/home goods are actually mixed into one category. Budget $50/month

Under-budget: +$5.82

 5. Shopping: This category really shocked me as I was looking through my Mint budgets. I do not like shopping at all! So I figured my shopping bill would be low but as it turns out, it can get high. This, of course, comes in waves. And I expect with the holiday season, it will be on the high side. Budget $100/month. 

Under-budget: $43.28

Savings/Investments

I’m behind on my Roth IRA contributions so I will be putting in $1,000/month until it’s maxed out. I also contribute to my 401k and company stock match but for simplicity’s sake, this budget will be only based on my after-tax dollars.

Loan Payments

I wanted to start automating my loan payment but I have not found a way to automate my payment only to one loan group as I am only targetting my highest interest rate loan. So until then, I will continue to make payments manually. My goal is to put $2,000/month to student loans.

Other

I bought my mom’s gift during Black Friday sale which sets me back $775.

Over-budget: $675

Overall, my budget sheet is somewhat confusing because if you’re only looking at the total, it gives the illusion that I only went over-budget by ~$4 when in reality I’m hundreds of dollars over-budget hence why I had to go under budget for my student loans normalizing the total.

What further over-complicates my budget is that I put the majority of my expenses on my 0% APR credit card that I only have to pay the minimum on till March. I’ve outlined my strategy of using a 0% APR credit card to pay off my student loans. I charge most of my expenses on the card allowing me to put the majority of my take-home pay to my loans.

As this is my first ever manual budget, the format is still tentative so there will probably be tweaks coming around as I continue to figure out this whole budgeting thing.