Welcome to my March 2019 student loan debt progress and net worth report!

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: $2,000

Debt remaining: $83,880

I also 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 put down $2000 towards my student loans this month which was quite a surprise because I remembered writing last month, “this will be my last student loan payment until April.” It was because I assumed I would be saving up for my vacation (which was nothing short of awesome and will be recapped on a separate post).

But surprisingly, I finally received my delayed work bonus so I was able to save up while not missing my loan payment.

When I filed my taxes last month, I found out that I owed a couple hundreds in federal tax but I did get some back from state. The nice thing was Turbotax let me schedule my federal tax payment for April but processed the refund from state right away. I was shocked to get my state refund within a week of filing.

So overall the two extra income I received from my bonus and state refund allowed me to keep up with the loan payments.

March 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.

My friends and I finally figured out our shares of the cell phone bill after a couple of months of changes. My friend has been paying the full bill for the last 3 months since it’s under her name and she suggested that I hold my payments to her until everything has been sorted out.

This month, I finally paid her back for the last 3 months’ worth of bills. Next month, cell phone bill should stay on budget.

Silly me just realized Netflix increased their price by $1 when I did my budget. But, all things considered, I am keeping my subscription.

Variable Spending

I’m under budget in a lot of my categories because most of my expenses came out of my travel category as I traveled on my first personal overseas trip (and by that I mean fully paid by yours truly sans family) this month.

The one thing that went up was my shopping budget as I bought some stuff for the trip.

I also was spring-cleaning and had donated many of my old clothes/shoes so I had to find replacements for those.

Other

I spent $1,500 this month on travel for my vacation, not including airfare and accommodations which I had paid in advance. I had given myself a max of $2,000 spending money to use while there but definitely did not want to reach that amount if possible.

I’m happy to say that I went under-budget on my travel category since in total I would already be spending >$3,000 on this trip once I take airfare and accomodation into account.

Investment

I put down $2,000 this month into my Roth IRA to start my 2019 contribution. Last month, I had only contributed $500 so I added extra this month to make up for it.

My plan for 2019 is to max my Roth IRA so I plan to contribute $1,000/month and get to the $6,000 limit ASAP at which point I can switch my attention to putting extra payments for my student loans.

Goal for Next Month

Pay down credit card debt! As I’ve mentioned previously, I use my 0% APR credit card to charge my daily cost of living so I can put most of my take-home pay to paying my student loans.

This may sound counter-intuitive to basically go in debt (credit card debt) to pay another debt (my student loan) but I’ve successfully used this method with my last credit card.

The trick is to not miss your minimum payment every month while the 0% APR promo is going on and to make sure to pay the balance in full before the 0% APR promo runs out.

When you do that, you basically get a free loan from the credit card company for ~1 year.

My current card, the Chase Freedom Unlimited offers this promo for 15 months and my promo is going to run out in July.

I currently carry ~$8,000 balance on this card which I will need to pay off in the next 3 months so my plan is to put down $3,000 in April and May and $2,000 in June to finish paying it off.

Net Worth Report: 2019 Q1

Back in my 2018 Year End Review, I decided to start tracking my net worth on a quarterly basis. At the end of last year, I started putting money into investments, not just on my student loans and therefore decided that net worth provided a more accurate picture of my financial account.

Well, the end of March means it is time for my first quarterly review of 2019. For reference, I use Personal Capital to track my net worth. It’s a free financial tool where I can view all my accounts including investments and loans in one place and calculates my net worth (my #1 reason for using it) for me.

So without further ado, this is what Personal Capital calculated for my net worth:

To compare to my 2018 end of year net worth:

Change: +$22,305!

Not too shabby. To be honest, I always feel like I am paying down my debt at such a slow pace. At my current rate of $2,000/month, there were days I definitely felt like I was going nowhere.

But to see this change in net worth the last 90 days has definitely given me new hopes.

At this point, it definitely makes my big 2019 goal of going into positive net worth seem attainable.

Until then, I’ll just continue churning out these loan payments and saving up as much as I can!