Welcome to my December 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: $4,000

Debt remaining: $88,927

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

As I was getting ready to do a round-up of 2018 (coming up for my next post it’s here), I became angry. Angry that I haven’t made much progress in paying off my debt in the latter half of 2018. In fact, I’ve been stuck in the $90k’s zone since July!

I definitely let myself go after the glee of getting my student loans under $100k back in July. So this month I vowed I would get to under $90k before the end of 2018. Luckily I scraped by, putting down $4000 this month…. by sadly dipping into my emergency fund, leaving a measly $1000 in my savings.

I am definitely noticing the vicious cycle I’m on, constantly rotating between paying down debt, rebuilding my emergency fund, and paying down my 0% APR credit card every time it starts to build up.

But to be honest, I’m fine with it. It gets the job done. And I like seeing big results all at once like when I put down big chunks to loan payments. ….Clearly, I’m still in the denial stage.

Budgeting

I started manually budgeting last month after years of only using Mint as a budgeting tool.

Check out last month’s post for a more detailed look into how I set up my first budget, what goes into it, and why I decided to create my own manual budget.

Let’s go through a breakdown of each section.

Fixed Spending

Nothing much to talk about here, just that I am still using up the bill credit I received for trading in my cell phone which is why I’m not paying any cell phone bill this month.

Variable Spending

1. Gas- Under-budget: +$20

2. Entertainment- New Years Eve celebration… enough said. Over-budget: -$15

3. Dining/drinking out- I live in a metropolitan HCOL city so the temptation is real when it comes to dining out at nice restaurants. I contemplated cutting down my dining/drinking out budget but as I mentioned in my first budget post, most of my hangouts/entertainment time with friends is spent dining out so this is somewhat lumped with entertainment category. Under-budget: +$100

4. Groceries- Over-budget due to the holiday potluck meals I had to shop for. Over-budget: -$11

5. Shopping- I am looking to cut my shopping budget in 2019 so I’m happy to see it trending down. Under-budget: +$12

Savings/Investments

I’m continuing to put down $1,000 to my Roth IRA until it is maxed out.

Loan Payments

As you can see I was under-budget for most of my expenses for this month. The reason why I was over-budget overall was that I put down $4,000 to my student loans this month to finally bring it under $90k. This was done by sadly dipping into my savings account.

Other

My 6-month car insurance premium was due in December so I paid it in a lump sum and I also had to pay $53 out-of-pocket for my contact lenses which I should be getting most back in the form of a rebate.

Overall, my budget sheet is somewhat confusing because technically paying down more than budgeted for my student loans should be considered good but with how my budget is set up it makes it look like I actually went over-budget.

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.

I’m still tentative on this budget set up. I like the simplicity of it but will still be on the lookout for a better setup.

Coming up (very) shortly will be my recap of 2018 where I jot down all my numbers for 2018 and my goals for 2019.