Welcome to my December 2019 debt progress!

If you are new here, every month, I post the progress I’ve made on paying off my student loans. I’ve done this since I first started paying down my loans in July 2017 and it has been so worth it.

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: $5,734.79

Debt remaining: $54,368.16

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

Debt Updates for This Month

I unexpectedly made a huge progress in December. I even paid off one of my loans completely, something I wasn’t expecting to be able to complete before 2020!

With holiday spending in December (including my Black Friday shopping hitting my credit card this month) and reduced paycheck due to all my days off during the holiday (as I’m paid hourly), I almost thought I’d only be able to make minimum payments on my student loans.

But as I had suspected and only now fully realized, paying off debt has become an addiction I cannot stop.

It took the longest time for me to build up my $10k emergency fund because I couldn’t bear to keep money saved up instead of throwing it all at the debt.

I thought I finally broke the cycle and managed to actually save up $10k this year in a separate savings account. I even had plans to stop being so aggressive in my monthly payments to my student loans so I can start saving for a down payment for a home.

But my mind had other ideas.

As soon as it saw I was closing in on $13k in my savings account, my addiction took over and before I knew it I had sent $3,100 straight to my student loan servicer not only to make additional payments, but to fully finish paying off my current highest interest rate loan.

Won’t lie, I’m super happy and proud of knocking out another loan off my list. I guess there are worse addictions to have. 

And this brings me closer to my goal of getting down to $50k loan before I go through with my refinance.

I’m happy to look at my debt chart and see that finally I have more loans that I’ve paid off than I am still paying. 8 down, 6 more to go!

December Budget

Fixed Spending

Nothing much here, just the usual expenses. I live at home but pay rent to my parents and am also paying back my personal loan to them at $500/month.

Other than that, my cell phone bill and Netflix make up the rest of my fixed spending.

Variable Spending

Over budget, especially with Black Friday (only now hitting my bank statement) and Christmas shopping that I did.

Shopping category went out of control, which is understandable with Christmas around. I did buy a couple of things for my mom over Amazon using my account since I have Prime. In return, she gave me $200 worth of gas card so I considered that an even bargain, hence why my gas budget this month and next month will be very minimal.

Miscellaneous

Other culprits include paying additional Airbnb expenses to make changes to my Christmas vacation reservation due to bad weather. My auto insurance 6 month renewal was the other inevitable spending that fell on this month.

Savings

No savings this month. Everything went into student loans and I even had to take an additional $1,000 from my savings account to finish paying off one of my loans.

Goals for Next Month

Can’t believe 2019 has come to an end! I have a lot of goals and dreams up my sleeve for 2020 so I’m certainly looking forward to it, even if it’s with a foolish optimism. 

I’m in the process of writing my 2019 year end review and my 2020 goals so that’ll be coming up very soon!

Happy New Years!