This will be a very short and sweet post as I will be doing a deeper end-of-year review. At first, I wasn’t very excited to do November and December’s review since it was marked by overspending on travel, gifts, and Black Friday shopping. But as the title of this post has given away, the big news is that I finally paid off my student loans!

November & December Budget

Fixed Spending

Unfortunately, both Hulu and Netflix went up in price so I will be updating my budget for 2024 to account for that on my streaming service budget. Otherwise, nothing else remarkable about my fixed spending other than my student loan which l dive more into later on in the post!

Variable Spending

I won’t go in depth into all my spending these two months as the honest truth is I am too lazy. The three big categories of spending were shopping, travel, and property tax.

Shopping – Black Friday sales and holiday gift shopping, enough said 🫣.

Travel – I went on two (hastily planned) road trips in December. I also paid for plane tickets and down payment on a tour I will be going on in February with my mom. If it hasn’t been obvious for the last 2 years, I’ve been bitten by the travel bug hard.

Property Tax – In addition to my supplemental 2023 bill, I was also due for my regular 2023-2024 bill in November. The price of home ownership…

Student Loans Paid Off!

Student debt paid in November: $880.77

Student debt paid in December: $13,059.29

Student debt remaining: ZERO!

I paid off my student loans just in time to end 2023!!! No one is more surprised than me. As I’ve previously written about, I absolutely love First Republic as a bank and was devastated to see them go under. Fortunately, they are now under Chase who I bank with and is my second favorite bank so the transition was not so bad. My mortgage has been transferred over to Chase but my student loans have not.

It reminded me that First Republic offered an incentive to pay off student loans early. By paying off my loans within 48 months (4 years), I would be able to get back my interest paid up to 2% of my original loan amount. 

When I first got the loan, I knew I wanted to take advantage of this incentive as I had selected a 5-year loan term so I would really be paying off my loans only 1 year early.

If I was smarter, I would have made the extra payments earlier so that my amortized interest would be lower that first year when my loan amount was the highest but I was too concerned with buffing up my cash funds in preparation of buying a house back in 2020. 

So now, 1 month away from my 48 months deadline, I decided to check if First Republic still offered the incentive. They did and $1000 hit my account the day after I paid off my loans! So while I paid $13,059 in total this month, I truly only paid $12,059 which is what I recorded in my debt statement.

It seemed like the stars all aligned on this move. Right before my last paycheck of the year, I received an award at work which came with a pretty nice, unexpected bonus!

I had initially lost hope on putting any extra money into investment or loan payments for the rest of the year as I just paid my property tax bill which set me back. But it seemed like it was a sign and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I will truly be able to start 2024 on a clean slate with no more student loan payments ever again!

It’s been a crazy 6.5 years journey of student loan payments to say the least. I’m glad I kept track of it on my debt progress page to look back on. I will likely write a more detailed review on my 6.5-year journey to paying off a total of $180,942 student loans as I look back on my data.

Investments/Savings

My last investment of 2023 came in November. Since then, the market has been a rockstar ending the year with almost 25% return. I’ll go more in-depth on my year-end review how this impacted my 2023 ending net worth!

Goals for Next Month

I’ll also save this for a broader 2023 goals review and 2024 goals on my next post!