October was a blast and I’m not surprised at all! Historically speaking, October has been my milestone month for the past 2 years. I climbed out of negative net worth in October 2019 to officially have $0 net worth. I followed it up by hitting $100k net worth in October 2020. So I had quite a bit of an expectation for this October.

While October of this year did not bring any financial milestones, it was full of fun. I especially got to fully enjoy my favorite season of the year by seeing the fall foliage.

I went on my final vacation of the year. And I even went to my first ever rave to celebrate Halloween this month! It was sort of a bucket list item for me and clearly I’m not getting any younger so I thought I better take the chance now while I have some friends going.

October was also a three-paycheck month so I had some extra take home pay this month which allowed me to make my first ever contribution to my Vanguard brokerage account after having opened it 3 years ago. I guess you can call that a mini financial milestone.

Student Debt

Student debt paid this month: $880.77

Student debt remaining: $38,257.19

I haven’t made much progress in paying down my student loans as I’m expecting my mortgage interest rate to be higher than my student loans so I’m not in any rush to pay it off. I’m just continuing my minimum payment of $880.77.

I’m also continuing to take advantage of the COVID-19 forbearance on my federal loans so I have not made any payments there since March of 2020. 

With the forbearance announced to end this year, I am thinking of making a lump sum amount in January 2022 to finish off the remaining ~$4,400 of my federal loans so I can finally close my Nelnet account.

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

October Budget

Fixed Spending

As noted since February, my parents and I agreed that I would postpone any monthly payments to them while I am in the midst of the home-buying process. I will instead continue to save up and resume payments once the home-buying process is complete.

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

Variable Spending

Gas – Gas spending is fairly low this month. This is because I was only home for 3 weeks. I did have a rental car on vacation but I separated my gas spending during my trip to my travel category.

Entertainment/dining out – I’m counting my travel in a different category hence why my entertainment budget is $0. 

My dining out spending is brutal. My travel this month is with my foodie friend. We even spent our last day before going back home doing nothing but going from one restaurant/bakery/cafe to another. We hit up 7 food places in total that one day 🙂

Groceries – This has become a common theme. Low grocery spending because I ate out too much. Needs to change… has yet to happen.

Shopping – Bought some new clothes and an outfit for Halloween.

Miscellaneous

Travel – Flights and some of the hotels were already booked last month hence the somewhat low travel spending this month.

Car Repair – I had to get my car window fixed since one of them wouldn’t roll down. Turns out to be an easy fix and thankfully didn’t require replacing anything but it still cost me $95 for the labor.

Doctor – Insurance sucks. Apparently, Vitamin D test is not covered as part of a blood test so I was billed for that portion of it. If I had known my insurance wouldn’t cover it, I would’ve rejected the test as I already know I have low Vitamin D anyways.

Savings

I’m still automatically allocating $1,000 to my savings account each paycheck for a total of $2,000/month. This month I finished maxing out my HSA! Therefore, I’ve now maxed out Roth IRA and HSA for the rest of the year with only 401K remaining.

I’m super excited to announce that I made my first contribution to a taxable brokerage account! A couple things allowed me to do this: first, October was a three-paycheck month; second, I lowered my 401K contribution so that I wouldn’t max out before the end of the year which would cause me to lose my employer match so I had more take-home pay; lastly, I came to terms that I wasn’t going to close on my home for at least 5 more months so I figured there was no reason for me to keep hoarding my money in a savings account rather than investing it.

Goals for Next Month

I still owe a recap of my travel itinerary for these past few trips just so I can look back later and remember my time. That will hopefully come up this month!

I currently have my 20% down payment money saved up in my savings account along with an extra $15k buffer for closing costs / unexpected costs / emergency fund. It’s a crazy amount of money to have in a plain savings account and because I don’t want to sound like a broken record, I’ll restrain myself from once again detailing how much wasted potential it is that I didn’t invest that money instead.

Instead, I can only look to the future and my plan is to stop putting any more money into my savings account and instead put that into my brokerage account where I will be investing the money into an index fund.

That’s it for October! Work has been getting crazy busy and I don’t anticipate being able to take any more time off for a couple of months. So I guess this will be my last hurrah of the year!