Welcome to my May 2019 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’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: $2,191

Debt remaining: $80,141

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 put down $2000 towards my student loans this month to my highest interest rate loan and had to make the $191 minimum payment to all my other loans for a total of $2191 payment.

I have ~$2452 left on the loan that I am currently focusing on (highlighted in yellow). My hope is to put in an extra $500 on top of my regular $2191 payment to finally pay that off next month!

Since my new payment plan took effect, I recalculated and found that I am now accruing ~$9 in interest every day. So every month I am roughly being charged ~$270 for the privilege of having this debt. Woo hoo… more motivation for me to get rid of it ASAP.

What’s even more shocking is that this is already a drastic decrease from the $600+ I was accruing in interest every month when I first started paying off my loans.

So if that isn’t motivation enough for making extra payments and paying off my student loans early, I don’t know what is.

May 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

Overall Memorial Day weekend, I went on a weekend trip to a neighboring city with my friends, rented an AirBnb and ate out the whole weekend so that took a bit of a hit on my entertainment/dining out budget.

But the biggest killer had to be that I bought a new laptop. And that set me back ~$800 into over-budget territory.

I will say this was a much needed purchase as I’ve had my old $500 Asus laptop since college so it’s lasted me 6 years which was far longer than I had anticipated for this budget laptop especially with it being used everyday in class throughout the last year of college and all of pharmacy school.

I greatly debated getting a new laptop since I’m barely ever on it since I finished school. Part of the reason for that is that over the years, my laptop has become so slow. It always disconnects from my internet at which point I have no choice but to restart because I cannot reconnect.

The hassle leads me to barely use it. The most use I get from my laptop is actually on updating this blog!

But Best Buy had a 1 day flash sale for the Macbook 12” (which was the model I wanted) for $500 off which is pretty much unheard of when it comes to Apple). So I caved and bought it. I’d like to think it’s a good purchase that I can use for 5+ years (I’m hoping for closer to 8-10 years).

Other

I have a yearly Tailwind subscription that was due for a renewal and I had to ship out a package to my relative through USPS.

Investment

I contributed $1,000 to my Roth IRA this month after not contributing anything last month. I am officially halfway done with maxing my 2019 Roth IRA.

My plan for 2019 is still 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.

Good news that’s not reflected on this budget is that I finished maxing out my HSA contribution ($3,500 for 2019) that’s taken directly from my paycheck (pre-tax) so I’ll be seeing an increase in my take-home pay starting next month that will hopefully be used as extra payments to student loans.

Goals for Next Month

1. Pay off credit card debt before 0% APR promo ends!

I talked about this in depth since my March’s check-in.

Remember last month when I nonchalantly wrote, “I’m not too worried because I do have ~$6000 saved up already in a high yield savings account that I can access if need be”?

Well I lied. I totally got worried in May. My new laptop purchase brought my credit card balance back up to almost $7,000 again. And my 0% APR ends in July.

The saving grace was that May turned out to be a 3 paycheck month. So I was able to use my first paycheck to pay down my student loan and the other two to pay down the credit card.

Despite that, I still had to dip into my savings account. Welps, no fun. This is going to set me back a bit as I will have to rebuild my emergency fund next month.

After using up most of my paychecks and my savings, I paid down $6,000 in credit card debt this month.

But I still have the $1,200 balance left on the card to worry about in June. Grrr.

I have no excuse for next month. I absolutely will have to pay off my balance in June because July is when the 0% promo period ends. Whatever it takes. Even if it means paying a lower amount to my student loans… which wouldn’t exactly go well with my #2 plan.

2. Finish paying off the ~$2500 balance on one of the student loans.

This loan is one of my highest interest rate loan that I’ve been making extra payments to since November 2018 and with $2,452 (will probably go up to $2,500 by end of month) balance remaining I really want to throw down the hatchet to kill it off once and for all.

It’s been a long time coming and after 6 months of working on paying it down relentlessly, I’d love to see it move to the red side of my debt statement.