December 2018 Statement of Net Worth Update

Hello, and welcome to our last net worth update for 2018! Boy, we have had some pretty big changes this month.

Assets

As if the unexpected change I will discuss below wasn’t enough, our assets decided to join in on the fun. So many decreases! There is one unusual increase however…

Savings – Emergency – You will notice an increase of $1,372. Instead of making a large payment to our smallest debt, we tucked the money in here instead. More about that later.

Car Insurance Savings – We paid our 6 month car insurance bill last month, so that’s the reason for the huge decrease in this account. When our car insurance is due, we charge it to our Capital One credit card for 1.5% cash back and then pay it off at the end of the month.

Vacation Fund – We withdrew $350 from here for our NYC trip last month, and then deposited $25.

Savings – Reg – We had what appears to be a drastic decrease of $1,300, but that is because our last update was late in the month. This account is our holding vessel for all our paychecks until the end of the month when we pay all our bills. Therefore, when I post updates late in the month, this account has a higher balance and impacts our net worth.

Checking – This decrease is just a regular fluctuation in our spending cash.

Liabilities

Navient – This account also ganged up on us during our struggle. We have an income based repayment plan that was due to reset November 1^st. It did not. Navient sent a bill for $595.72 which is my standard repayment amount. I called to have this fixed, and the customer service rep corrected our automatic draft back down to $217.42. A couple of days afterwards I had 10 past due notices totaling $378.30 (the amount remaining from $595.72). I went ahead and paid the bill, and was told our automatic draft for December 1^st would be fixed. It wasn’t. We paid $595.72 on this day as well. Finally, it is fixed for January 1^st! Our new payment will be $307.86.

SSI Debt – Every month I call The Debt Management Department in Chicago to pay $100 for an over-payment on my son’s SSI that I received when he was a minor. The balance started at over $7,000 and we have gotten down to $2,600 in $100 monthly increments. However, I have not been able to get through the phone lines for the last couple of months.

Fortunately, the last time I actually did get through to someone he sent me an automatic payment form to fill out so I could have the payments deducted from my credit card automatically. I filled it out and sent it in, and to my delight last month I didn’t need to call because the payment came out on its own!

However, they have not drafted a payment since then and I cannot get through on the phone lines. They have the authorization to draft funds if they ever choose to. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this account at all. I can’t get them to take my money!

Conclusion

We decreased our debts $1,407 this month, but due to the decreases in our assets, we only saw an increase of $150 for a total net worth of $(15,443). After the month we had, it’s a miracle we didn’t go backwards! Oh yeah, about that…

Planned Debt Pay Off/ Life Update

On November 29, one day before I would have sent that big payment to Great Lakes, my husband called to tell me he had just been fired.

I am so incredibly grateful it happened before November 30, because it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to try to reign that money back in. So, we paid our bills as we usually would and then everything left over went in to the emergency fund to help us ride out this storm.

X has been a trooper and took job searching as his new full time job. I encouraged him to take his time and really use this as an opportunity to find something that paid better, had better hours, and just made him feel proud to say he worked there.

Since we have been paying off debt, we have decreased our bills to the point where my income alone was almost enough to fully support us. We would be short about $75 per month, but whatever shortage we had would be drawn from the emergency fund. If necessary, this could have continued for months. That was a really comforting fact.

Every morning he got up, hit the job markets, applied like crazy, attended a bunch of interviews and finally on December 10^th he signed an offer. He starts December 17^th as a bilingual customer service rep at a local bank here in Michigan. It pays $2/hr more than what he made at his previous employer and there is lots of opportunity for advancement.

The timing still stinks, of course. December is still a one income month, and of course it’s the holidays which rubs a little salt in the wound. We will not be cancelling Christmas, however. Again, whatever we are short at the end of December will be drawn out of the emergency fund, and in January we will be a two income family again, and back to demolishing student loans!

Thank you, as always, for reading.

XOXO,

 

Dolores

August 2018 Navient Review

Hello, and welcome to our August 2018 Navient Review! Boy, do I have a lot to report!

On my last update, I was struggling with putting myself on schedule with my side hustle, Shipt. I made a few attempts to get back on the band wagon. I told myself that I was putting my car at risk and depreciating the value of it faster. But suddenly, something clicked.

I realized I am damn lucky that I can set my own schedule and make nearly $20 an hour doing so, on my terms, whenever I want or don’t want to. And as for putting my car in danger, and just being tired I told myself: “This is temporary.” And it is! This is not forever, and the more I do now, the faster I can stop busting my ass.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am back. Now to find a way to update you guys on 4 months of absence…

May 2018

4/6/2018

• $101.06 Paycheck
• $30.32 Saved for Taxes
• $25.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $50 to Navient!

4/20/2018

• $35.12 Paycheck
• $10.54 Saved for Taxes
• $10.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $25 to Navient!

4/27/2018

• $43.61 Paycheck
• $13.08 Saved for Taxes
• $15.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $25 to Navient!

June 2018

At the beginning of May I really made a valiant effort, but quickly burned out again.

5/4/2018

• $157.42 Paycheck
• $42.43 Saved for Taxes
• $20 Filled the Tank
• Sent $100 to Navient!

5/11/2018

• $133.45 Paycheck
• $40.04 Saved for Taxes
• $20.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $75 to Navient!

July 2018

I took a few orders in June, but it was only enough to cover gas. I use this gas to get to work also, so it’s not a complete wash to only have money to cover gas. It’s still extra and it still helps!

6/22/2018

• $17.79 Paycheck
• $5.34 Saved for Taxes
• $10 Filled the Tank

6/29/2018

• $20.01 Paycheck
• $6.00 Saved for Taxes
• $20 Filled the Tank

August 2018

I’m finally back! At the time of writing this, I have gotten a paycheck for 7 weeks in a row, and I’m getting paid again next Friday. They say it takes 66 days to create a habit, so I’m pretty confident I’m back.

7/6/2018

• $26.43 Paycheck
• $7.93 Saved for Taxes
• $20.00 Filled the Tank

7/13/2018

• $66.66 Paycheck
• $20.00 Saved for Taxes
• $20.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $25 to Navient!

7/20/2018

• $74.26 Paycheck
• $22.28 Saved for Taxes
• $15.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $25 to Navient!

7/27/2018

• $29.31 Paycheck
• $8.79 Saved for Taxes
• $20.00 Filled the Tank

8/3/2018

• $111.21 Paycheck
• $33.36 Saved for Taxes
• $25 Filled the Tank
• Sent $50 to Navient!

It was interesting grabbing all these numbers for an all-at-once update. I got to really see how the amounts change over the course of those 4 months, and I’m starting to re-think my Navient Snowball. Here’s how I have things lined up currently:

1. #1 – $2,268 @ 5.75% Interest
2. #2 – $3,532 @ 5.35% Interest
3. #7 – $7,323 @ 6.55% Interest
4. #4 – $7,565 @ 6.55% Interest
5. #5 – $8,654 @ 6.55% Interest
6. #10 & 11 – $16,645 @ 6.375% Interest

I am approaching my debt with a hybrid snowball/avalanche approach. I only focus on accounts with more than a 4% interest rate, and then from those I work from smallest to largest. However, the amounts seem to gain more interest even though the interest rates are lower, or the balances are lower. I am pretty sure that’s because of the subsidized vs unsubsidized loans; some of them have a lot more interest accrued on them already and that interest is gaining interest.

Let’s take a look at how these accounts have increased from April until August and see if they still fall in the order I put them in to begin with.

• SL #1:  $0 (Duh, I’ve been working on this one, no chance to increase)
• SL #2: +$7.00
• SL # 7: +$14.70
• SL # 4: +$4.62
• SL #5: $+10.56
• SL # 10 & 11: +$27.62

Now some of these are obvious: Of course #10 and #11 will have super-high interest due to their super-high balance.

But look at #4 and #5. There is a $1,000 difference in balance and the same interest rate, but one is increasing at over twice the rate of the other. Do you think that using this information, #5 should come before #4? It’s definitely something worth pondering.

For now, #1, #2, and #7 look like they are in appropriate places on the chopping block so I have quite a long time to go before deciding, especially with my $25-$50 weekly stabs at the balance.

As always, thanks for reading. It’s really great to be back.

XOXO,

 

Dolores

August 2018 Net Worth Update

Hello, and welcome to our August 2018 Statement of Net Worth Update! Everything went according to plan this month and so there is not much to report on at all. This is a good thing!

Assets

None of these accounts moved much except for the normal fluctuations we see month to month.

Savings – Reg seems to have a significant decrease, but this account is just a pot to hold all our money until the end of the month when we pay our bills. At the time of writing our July update, we already had a lot of money built up to go toward the August 1st bills.

I finished inputting our August numbers more toward the beginning of the month, so these numbers are much more normal.

Liabilities

No increases once again!

CP Visa – On our last update, I estimated we would have about $1,000 to go toward debt. We actually had $925. Together with the “minimum” payment I make every month, we reduced this account $1,025! This is extra exciting because this account has always been one that we struggled with.

Whenever we were running low on spending money, or — I’m a little ashamed to admit this, whenever I didn’t feel like spending “real” money, we would use this account and then just pay our $100 a month.

We have swiped this card every once in a while in the past few weeks, but whenever we replenish our spending money I immediately calculate the total of the 2-3 swipes a week and put it back on the CP Visa. This is working well to keep the account at the balance we worked hard to pay off.

I have always thought that I would keep budgeting $100 a month for credit card spending, so paying it off wouldn’t affect our monthly bills, but I think I like the weekly pay offs from our spending money better. Also, we won’t be losing $25-30 a month in interest anymore, so that’s even more money we get to keep! I love how this debt pay off stuff works.

Navient – I am happy to report that I am officially back on the bandwagon for my side hustle, Shipt! I put myself on the schedule every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. This gives me enough to pay $25 – $50 a week extra toward my student loans after saving for taxes and filling my gas tank.

This also means my student loan reports will be coming back, so keep an eye out for that! I have a big goal of paying off Navient #1 before the end of the year. That’s going to be a pretty big feat, seeing as there’s still $2,243 remaining at the time of writing this post.

Planned Debt Pay Off/ Life Update

I have spacers for my braces in right now. I have had them for 10 days and they are still uncomfortable. I am really tired of mashed potatoes and gravy. I can eat bits of meat and real food now, but nothing as adventurous as a sub or a burger. I had a piece of pizza a few days ago and that was a major victory.

The spacers come out in 11 more days, and I get my actual braces installed! I figure I will probably be reduced to smoothies and soup again for a week after each orthodontist appointment, but that’s okay.

I found out how much my braces are costing us out of pocket, and what the payment coming out of our HSA will be: $425! Total. My braces cost $4,650. My husband’s insurance is paying $2,325 (half), my insurance is paying $1,500, and the orthodontist is giving us a $400 discount because my daughter also had braces through them. They are splitting the payment up over 5 months for $85 per month. I can’t believe how lucky we got! But preparing ourselves and planning things out strategically isn’t really luck, is it?

I mentioned last month that I had a test coming up in Chicago. I’ve since taken it. I don’t have the scores yet, but I did get reimbursed for it. That money will show up on my next update.

That test was actually very difficult and I’m not confident I passed. I’m happy with the amount of time I studied; I really think I did my best with the materials I was given, but there was a lot more stuff on the test that wasn’t covered. I feel like the materials I received taught me more of the basics, and I was given in-depth questions. I won’t be upset if I didn’t pass because I was not properly prepared. The next test is in October and I will have to pay $150 out of pocket for a re-take. I’ll let you know in the next update what my scores were. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll know the moment I do!

At the end of August, I project we will have about $1,500 remaining to put toward debt, and it will go toward our credit card. Here is the current debt snowball:

1. CP Visa – $2,548 (9.5% interest)
2. Great Lakes – $3,518 (4.7% interest)
3. Navient SL #1 – $2,243 (5.75% interest)

Conclusion

Although our net worth actually decreased this month, we decreased our debt nearly $2,000 which is pretty incredible! Our net worth is now $(22,686).

Thank you for reading!

 

XOXO,

 

Dolores/networthnegative

July 2018 Statement of Net Worth Update

Hello and welcome to our July 2018 Statement of Net Worth Update! I mentioned in our last update that I thought things would be looking up from here on out, and so far things are going well! We were able to pay off one of our debts this month, and it feels incredible!

Assets

House – The housing market is definitely done with the crazy uptick in value that we have seen over the last few months. Can’t complain! It was a fun ride up. In March 2018 our home was worth $82,450. Now it is worth $89,163 so we saw a $6,713 increase in just 4 months.

401(k) – X – I’m not typically too concerned with fluctuations in the stock market, but I wanted to mention that this account is from my husband’s old employer. We are trying to figure out the process of rolling it over to his new employer’s plan or perhaps opening a Roth IRA. I listen to a lot of personal finance podcasts so I know what we should do in theory, but actually opening an account and getting it rolled over is scary and confusing. We always back off because we’re afraid the check will come in our name and be treated as an early withdrawal.  Due to this, his account has sat stagnant for a while and is starting to accumulate fees.

The good thing about these monthly updates is that we have to face every month that this account hasn’t yet been dealt with. Just this past week as we were collecting all our numbers, my husband remembered that he hadn’t completed the new employer’s 401(k) election. If we weren’t checking this monthly, who knows how long it would have taken to realize he wasn’t contributing at all?

Another good thing is that now that his new account is open, it looks as though we can access the routing number and account number for the old account to roll over electronically. This was information we didn’t have before and why we kept getting nervous.

Emergency Fund – We have a fully funded emergency fund again. Hooray!

HSA – I used $147 from this account for new glasses. It is so good to see again. My glasses went missing and after a few weeks of being blind and relying only on my prescription sunglasses, I had to finally break down and get a new pair. Luckily I was overdue anyway so our insurance covered a good portion.

Liabilities

No Increases this month! Yeah!!

Personal Loan – Say goodbye to this account! We were able to pay it off, and it will be off the breakdown next month.

CP Visa – After paying off the above account, there was even a little money left over to go toward paying this one off!

Navient – We only decreased $6 in this account this month. That’s because I haven’t made any additional payments to Navient since May 11. As of the writing of this article, I have been a little better about getting myself on schedule again for my side hustle.

I am trying to come to terms with how lucky I am that I have a side hustle where I can set my own hours, and make nearly $20 per hour. I am also trying to keep in mind the mantra popular with people on a debt free journey: This is temporary.

Someone else recommended getting a visual tracker to help with my motivation to keep going. I have just filled it out and set it up at work, and I’m already excited to fill in more lines.

https://debtfreecharts.com/

Planned Debt Pay Off/ Life Update

As of 7/27/201 I expect us to have about $1,000 remaining to go toward debt pay off. Here is our updated snow ball for the end of July:

1. CP Visa – $3,475 (9.5% interest rate)
2. Great Lakes – $3,630 (4.7% interest rate)
3. Navient SL #1 – $2,375 (5.75% interest rate)

We are approaching out debt free journey with a combination snowball/avalanche method. Great Lakes is above Navient #1, because my husband’s one student loan is not on an Income Based Repayment Plan so we are paying $50.60 a month to this account. Paying it off will free up $50.60 per month to go toward other bills. Paying off the Navient Student Loan #1 will have an unknown impact on my Income Based Repayment Plan, but I imagine it will be much less than Great Lakes.

Some other things coming up include:

I’m getting braces in less than a month! Yikes! We are doubly insured for dental and vision, so this actually won’t cost that much. About $75 per month. There’s a 5% discount for paying in full, but only if it’s paid in cash so I would have to forfeit my tax savings by using our HSA. Since we are in the 12% bracket this wouldn’t be a savings for me, so monthly payments from our HSA it is.

I have an important test coming up in August in Chicago for my new position, so I’ll need to cash flow the hotel stay for that. We paid $150 from last month’s budget for this test and if (I mean when) I pass I will have that $150 reimbursed. The hotel stay will be reimbursed as well. This test will determine my trajectory for becoming a Senior Radiation Safety Coordinator which could have a big impact on our debt free journey. Wish me luck! The test is August 9^th.

Conclusion

In July, we reduced our debt $2,299 and increased our net worth by $5,277 for a total of $(22,035)!

As always, thank you for reading. I hope you will follow me on Instagram @networthnegative for daily updates on our debt free journey.

XOXO,

 

Dolores

June 2018 Net Worth Update

Hello, and welcome to our June 2016 Statement of Net Worth!

I think this will be the last “bad” report for a while. At the end of June we should be able to start making some pretty good sized payments to our debt. But as for the end of May, we were just able to keep up like we have been for the past few months. But, for the first time since 4/2017 our net wort actually decreased this month. Boo.

Assets

House – It appears the huge boom in the market that we have been experiencing for the last few months is starting to slow down.

Dart – Our Dodge Dart fell quite a bit this month! Kelly Blue Book (where I get our values from) has changed their website so now there are more steps involved for me to get our car values. I may have been misreporting in the last few reports.

Savings – Car Insurance – We paid our insurance this month so that’s why this account is now at $0. We pay our car insurance every 6 months in full to take advantage of a 5% discount for doing so. It drafts automatically from our Capital One credit card which earns us 1.5% cash back so that’s a further discount on top of the 5%. I am hoping that since we are paying off our CP Visa soon, our credit scores will improve and result in a lower amount due for our auto insurance renewal in Mid-November. We will find out the new amount sometime in October. This last cycle amount due was $1,250.

Liabilities

Nothing too exciting to report here, except that we kept almost all the liabilities from going up, with the exception of the CP Visa card. This time, we used the card for a couple trips to the grocery store. Every month we set aside $100 a month to pay to this card, and when it’s paid off I’m going to still assign $100 out of our budget to it, since we seem to keep swiping it. It’s never much, so I think that $100 will keep the balance at $0 month to month. Here’s to not losing $30 per month in interest anymore! That’s nearly a tank of gas!

Plus, keeping an eye on this card and its swipes has taught me the areas that we need to set up sinking funds for: Pets and Auto. Using the card for groceries was just poor planning on our part, we obviously overspent and went through our allocated money too quickly. Getting rid of the $30 per month interest on this card, and an additional $30 in interest on the Planned Debt Pay Off I will discuss below will help us keep more money each month and hopefully curb the overspending!

Life Update/Planned Debt Pay Off

My husband had a business trip to Indianapolis as part of his career path in to management. We pulled $500 from our emergency fund to cash flow this trip which involved a car rental, fuel, and spending. All of this will be reimbursed and our total out of pocket only amounted to just under a couple hundred dollars. When I brought the $500 from savings to our checking account, my husband then transferred it over to our CP – Visa account because he wanted the business trip transactions separate from our regular spending. So, $500 extra toward debt pay off a little early!

As of 6/29/2018, I expect us to have $1,700 excess savings to put toward our debts. Here is the updated debt snowball:

1. $700 Emergency Fund (replenish)
2. $960 CP Loan (9.5% interest rate)
3. $3,425 CP Visa (9.5% interest rate)

Looks like we are getting rid of the Personal Loan this month! This debt has a minimum of $150 per month, $30 of it interest so that will be a lot extra freed up every month to go toward more debts. Thank goodness for months with extra paychecks in them.

Conclusion

Although our net worth decreased $398, we were still able to decrease our debts by $1,026. Our net worth is now $(27,312) but I still believe we can become worthless by the end of the year.

As always, thanks for reading!

 

XOXO,

 

Dolores

Change of Plans: Private Mortgage Insurance

Hi there!

A few months ago, I changed the layout of my Statement of Net Worth Updates to include the smallest 3 debts coming up in our debt snowball.

Since the beginning of our journey I have expressed interest in paying off additional principal on our mortgage in order to get rid of the Private Mortgage Insurance on our account.

We bought our house in 2011 for $73,500 under land contract. You can read more about what a land contract is in my post here.

We put $10,000 down in 2011 and made payments throughout the years and then in 2015 we got a traditional mortgage through Quicken Loans. At that time we had paid the principal down but with extra costs added in to our mortgage our loan amounted to $64,800 and Quicken estimated our home’s value at $72,000. We were unable to come up with another down payment for the traditional financing since we were advised that we had to do repairs in order to qualify for an FHA loan.

In the end, our house wasn’t eligible for FHA lending because of an inaccessible crawl space under a kitchen nook that was added on to our home many years prior to our purchase. Since we were not able to give access to the crawl space without significant damage which we refused to consent to, our loan almost fell through completely!

Thankfully we were able to back track and get a conventional loan seeing as this is what we originally requested in the beginning. I think some strings were pulled because of our poor experience with being guided in to doing an FHA loan and spending our down payment on repairs under their advisement.

Since then, I have done research on how to get rid of our PMI. I understood there were 2 ways for it to fall off: We can request its removal early once we reach 80% original loan to value of our home, but we would have to pay for an appraisal to prove the value. The second way is if we had done substantial improvements to the home, boosting the value which would then bump us in to a lower loan to value ratio. Again, we would have to pay for the appraisal to prove the value. The third way would be once the loan reaches 78% original loan to value, the PMI would come off automatically.

I decided the latter was the best course of action because we would not only be saving tens of thousands of dollars by making big payments very early in our loan term, but in addition our mortgage payment would be reduced $54.54 a month. We would of course continue to make the same payment to our mortgage that we had all along so this would result in an additional $54.54 a month to principal for the rest of the term of the loan.

78% of our original value would have been $56,160. Currently, we owe $61,038 on our mortgage. Getting rid of PMI has been the #3 priority on our debt snowball until a few days ago when I got this letter in the mail which effectively threw a wrench in that plan.

It turns out that PMI is written in to our contract to remain until the originally scheduled date that we will reach 78% LTV:  8/2022. I called to verify and the rep advised that we could (surprise) pay for an appraisal and get rid of PMI early without the extra payments. I am supposed to get a call next week to tell me what the cost of that would be, since our home values are going up like mad currently. According to our May 2018 Statement of Net Worth our home is worth $88,617. That number comes from Zillow so may not be too accurate, but if it is that means our mortgage is 68% of our home’s value.

My husband is a little nervous about this transaction because it could blow up in our faces and determine that our home isn’t yet worth $78,250 and we will be stuck with having wasted our money on that appraisal and still paying PMI. But, I think it’s worth a shot. Do you have thoughts?

Update

It’s been a week since I last wrote. Since then I have spoken with Quicken’s PMI Removal department and was advised that a home evaluation will cost $200, and that they will be looking at the interior and exterior of the home, counting bedrooms, number of rooms, and looking for any updates.

In order to request the appraisal I need to submit a request in writing, and give my payment over the phone. It will then take 3-5 days to schedule the actual appraisal, and 10-14 days for Quicken to get the numbers. I was advised my home needs to appraise at $81,333 in order to remove PMI.

I have also done a little more research in to how accurate a Zillow Zestimate ® is. One article I read stated that that Zillow’s estimate is within 5% of the true assessed value only 50% of the time. It can be as much as 10-20% difference in the actual value. That article was written by a real estate company, so their opinion could be biased, but I’ve decided to wait until our Zillow Zestimate ® is $95,685 before we move forward with scheduling the appraisal. That will give us a 15% buffer, and it isn’t very far from what the value already is. Plus, I have more updates I would like to do coming up. The first of which will be adding a half bathroom to our basement. We only have one bathroom currently and it’s terrible.

Anyway, now that PMI is getting knocked off the debt snowball, that moves one of my Navient accounts, SL #1 in to its spot.

I have long dreaded when the Student Loans will make it in to the Debt Snowball countdown because they are going to take so long to get rid of. I am worried about debt fatigue.

Also, I have not been participating in my side hustle for about one month so I haven’t been making those extra weekly payments either. If I continue like this, we will have the biggest percentage rate student loans paid off sometime after 2020.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far in to my post! Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram for daily updates on our debt free journey. If you are a follower, you were privy to the PMI drama as it unfolded, and how fun is that?!

Thanks again.

XOXO,

 

Dolores

April 2018 Navient Review

Hello, and welcome to out April 2018 Navient Review!

March was a tough month for our family, financial-wise. I went over that in our April 2018 Statement of Net Worth Update. I struggled again in the early part of March with putting myself on the schedule. I did not have a check on March 9, and March 16’s check was accidentally absorbed in our checking account so I didn’t set aside any money for taxes or Navient, but I did get $20 gas. That check was $71.16.

I know I have been saying that I want to get my crap together and get going again, and I think at the time of writing this that I am back on track!

3/30/2018

• $101.65 Paycheck
• $30.50 Saved for Taxes
• $25.00 Filled the Tank
• Sent $50 to Navient!

3/31/2018

• $105.00 2018 First Quarter Cash Tips
• $31.50 Saved for Taxes
• Sent $75 to Navient!

That’s all I had to offer for the April 7^th Statement! I was able to bring Navient #1 down $122.23, with an overall decrease of $113.05. Don’t forget in addition to these extra payments, I also make my regular payment of $217.47.

I am on a mission to get rid of the highest interest accounts. If I had not made those extra payments, I would just be treading water with Navient. Of course that is better than when my Income Based Repayment Plan payments were $90.61 and my total account balance grew over $200 every month. In November 2015 and 2014 my payments were $0 so it grew even more! I wasn’t tracking back then so who knows what the damage was.

Presently, I must admit attacking Navient #1 is not as fun as Navient #9 was. I was able to knock #9 below $1,000 right away, and once it was in the triple digits every little payment I made seemed to have a huge impact on the overall balance.

Navient #1 is not giving me that quick win, so I’m not as motivated as I was when I first started. Of course, my side hustle was shiny and brand new back then so maybe the novelty is just wearing off. I will keep plugging away, motivation or no.

My apologies for the late update. Running the numbers was a little confusing for me because of it! I’ll be back in a week or 2 with my May 2018 update.  Hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading.

 

XOXO,

 

Dolores

April 2018 Net Worth Update

Hello, and welcome to our April 2018 Statement of Net Worth!

We are a lot later than usual because we are still recovering from all that went wrong in March. Murphy is continuing to kick our butts in April, but we are almost through it now! The future looks bright. May is a 5 Pay Day month for me, and June is a 3 Pay Day month for my husband’s biweekly paychecks so we should be recovering nicely soon, and saying goodbye to our Personal Loan soon along with its $150/month minimum payment. That’ll be a nice reduction in monthly expenses.

But, as for April we could only make our minimum payments and it took us a few pay days in to April to be able to cover those expenses. But, even though we have had a couple tough months our debt continues to fall and our net worth continues to grow.

Assets

House – The housing market is doing something wacky. These numbers are all a snapshot in time at around 4/9/2018 when I was able to make my last minimum payment for the bills due in April. Since I am now writing this 10 days later, the house value is continuing to sky rocket according to Zillow. The one year forecast has our home pegged to reach nearly $100k. That’s unthinkable to me, and now instead of being excited, I’m watching this cautiously. Are we heading in to another bubble?

Our real estate company recently posted a Facebook Live video stating they have stacks of files for pre-approved buyers, and not enough homes for them to buy. Demand is high and people are missing out on opportunities because they are beat out by other buyers, so they are settling for homes they don’t love, which I find sad. I wonder how long this will continue, and if the market will fall by the time we are ready to move on to purchasing our first rental property. Let’s hope so!

Savings – Emergency – Again, since I am privy to information I wouldn’t normally have when I should be writing these posts, I can tell you that we had to use some money from our Emergency Fund for my son’s car repair so we will see this asset decrease next month. I also need a car repair, but I’m not sure how much that will be and if we will be able to swing it or need to dip further in to our Emergency Fund.

Liabilities

There was only one small increase in Liabilities this month. Since we were only able to make our minimum payments, all our balances decreased as usual with the exception of the CP – Visa account.

I was able to make a few extra payments to Navient with my side hustle at Shipt resulting in a decrease of $331, which I am proud of.

Planned Debt Pay Off/ Life Update

My husband is now about 6 weeks in to his new position, and he likes it! Adjusting to the biweekly paycheck has been a struggle. The typical way that we would break up our spending money when we both were paid weekly would look like this:

Wednesday – $100 for gas and spending (usually takeout)

Friday – $100 for groceries

We used to do $50 a week budget for groceries and $50 a week for spending cash ($20 each for my husband and myself and $10 for my daughter), but since nixing the grocery budget we haven’t been able to do the spending cash. I feel like this is resulting in lots more debit and credit swipes for takeout and overall decreased happiness. Having that pocket money to save up or to spend on whatever we chose made us happy!

Since he now gets paid every other Friday I assumed that if we tucked an extra $100 in to Savings – Reg and then took it out on Non-Pay Friday that it would work out just the same. In theory, yes but it just doesn’t seem to be a smooth transition at all! Maybe that’s because of the tough couple of months we had.

I base my husband’s paychecks off 45 hours per week, and his last couple of checks have been nearly $200 more than my projection. For now, instead of adjusting my projection I’ve decided to continue with the “base” projection at 45 hours and whatever extra, is extra. This is allowing us to take our spending cash out again which hopefully will reduce the amount of swiping in our checking account. Last week I had to take $100 extra out of Savings – Reg on 3 separate occasions because we were burning through it so fast! It really was an off month. With this new tweak, I’m hoping the money I project to have in savings at the end of the month will STAY in savings!

Last month I projected we would have another $375 to send to our smallest debt, but we didn’t have anything extra at all. In fact we weren’t able to cover all of our April bills until April 8^th.

At the end of April (only a few days away now as I write this) we again won’t have any extra money to send to debt. We will be able to pay all of the May bills by May 2^nd instead of the last payday of April which will be April 25^th.

I’m really looking forward to May and June when we will have excess savings and things will get exciting again!

The smallest 3 debts in our Debt Snowball as of April 2018 are:

1. Personal Loan – $1,366 (9.5% interest rate)
2. CP Visa – $3,754 (9.5% interest rate)
3. PMI – $5,003

Conclusion

Although we had a tough couple of months we still increased our Net Worth by $3,950 for a total Net Worth of $(33,400)! The nice, round numbers are continuing!

Please don’t forget to follow me on Instagram for daily updates on our journey to a positive net worth.

Thanks for reading!

XOXO,

Dolores

March 2018 Navient Review

Hello and welcome to our March 2018 Navient Review! It’s been a weird month. I didn’t do too much work for Shipt this month because I was getting overtime left and right at my full time job. When I take in to account the cost of gas and the time spent shopping and delivering an order, I come out way ahead getting overtime hours at my full time job.

That being said, I did catch a few shops here and there.

2/9/2018

• $573.12 Excess Tax Savings
• Sent $310.81 to Navient #9. Paid in Full!
• Sent $275 to Navient #1

I also cashed in my Shipt Income Tax Savings since I got a refund! This resulted in a huge payment that got rid of Navient #9 once and for all! Now the attack starts on Navient #1.

2/9/2018

• $56.54 Paycheck
• $16.96 Saved for Taxes
• Sent $25 to Navient!

2/16/2018

• $47.85 Paycheck
• $14.36 Saved for Taxes
• Sent $25 to Navient!

3/2/2018

• $51.16 Paycheck
• $15.35 Saved for Taxes
• Sent $25 to Navient!

Recap

I sent a total of $660.81 extra to my student loans for the March billing cycle, and reduced my loans a total of $673.05! Not bad at all.

I know I said last month that I was hoping to get back in to the swing of things, but we had an unexpected turn of events at my full time job which resulted in me being needed there so I didn’t have much time for Shipt at all.

I am hoping in the future to start making around $100 per week again so I can continue getting these debts paid off!

I have also decided to clean out my cash tips jar quarterly so we will see those payments 3/31, 6/30, 9/30, and 12/31.

Thank you for reading!

XOXO,
Dolores

Addressing My Biggest Fear: Financial Ruin Via Medical Bills

I am an unusually healthy person and only go to the doctor for annual checkups. I rarely get sick and I have a high pan tolerance so when I do get sick or injured (think: The Haunted House Incident), I often muscle through it. It’s a source of pride for me if you can’t tell. This makes me a perfect candidate for a High Deductible Health Plan.

My husband however is not so lucky. He has a medical condition that has been ignored for years: a dangerously low heart rate. Recently, he failed a physical because of it. His heart was beating a mere 32 beats per minute, and he was advised that he is at Stage 2 of having a heart attack. Stage 3 is heart attack and possible death. He went from getting a standard physical for an exciting new opportunity to a scary reality check. We cannot ignore this anymore.

I dealt with this news by becoming angry which is my usual method of adjusting to a stressful situation: Anger, Defeat, Acceptance, and then eventually Planning.

To be completely honest, this has always been my worst fear since starting out becoming financially secure, attaining good credit, and buying a home.

I am reading a book called The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman, and she advised us to address what we are afraid of. I am afraid I’m going to lose everything. The one thing I see that could wipe us out is a medical emergency resulting in medical bills we can’t afford, debt, collections, law suits,  bad credit, financial ruin, AH!

My husband and I ran numbers a few years and found that we were both better off paying for our insurance individually. Since I enjoy good health, I have been part of a HDHP for a couple of years now. In 2017, I contributed $500 to my Health Savings Account in order to get a maximum $250 match from my employer. I used the savings for medical, dental, and vision bills for my family, and any bills above the $750, I contributed after tax dollars and deducted that from our income at tax time.

Even though I am the only person covered on my plan, I am still able to pay for bills for my spouse and my dependents.

Knowing all of this, and having this medical scare for my husband brought out the planner in me.

I have mentioned before that every debt free journey is going to be personal because we are dealing with personal finance. This is another way that I am tailoring our debt free journey to our specific needs. A medical emergency scares the living daylights out of me. I don’t want to hide anymore. I don’t want my husband to go on pretending he is healthy only because his condition hasn’t become serious enough to affect his daily life yet because in reality, eventually it will and waiting will only make it worse.

We are going to do what we can with what is available to us and start preparing for the bills that are coming as he gets his work up done by his cardiologist. I’m going to decrease my take home pay in order to increase my HSA contributions.

I have read that a good rule of thumb to contribute each year to an HSA is the amount of our deductibles. My deductible is $1,750. His is $2,500. Yes, that’s right. My unhealthy husband is in a high deductible plan. We will have to fix that coming up! More about that later.

Since I am the only one covered on my HDHP Plan, the most I can contribute is $3,450 even though our deductibles add up to $4,250.

Now, I know that we could use that $3,450 a year to pay off debt and keep going on our merry way, but like I said this medical issue needs to be addressed and it needs to be worked in to the budget. This is how we are going to do it. Maybe it’s a little wacky, a little doomsday if you will, but it makes me feel worlds better. We will be adding the HSA balance as an asset account in our Statements of Net Worth Updates beginning in March 2018.

Here are some notes from a little research I have done.

HSA Notes

2018 limit is $3,450. After age 55 you can contribute $1,000 catch up.

Only I am covered on my HDHP, but I can pay for medical, dental, and vision bills for my husband and children. Hearing is covered as well.

Unused money rolls over year to year and is able to be invested once your account exceeds $1,000 (I plan to keep the amount of our deductibles as a “cash reserve” before investing in a mutual fund).

If I leave the plan, I still own the money but I can’t contribute any additional funds.

All contributions (matches from employer, gifts, after tax additions, and pretax additions) all count toward the maximum annual contribution.

After age 65, you can withdraw the funds for any reason just like a 401(k).

I am not eligible for an HSA if I have other insurance in addition to my HDHP.

A Happy Ending

Remember that failed physical? Well, the cardiologist declared my husband healthy enough for the opportunity which brought him to the Medical Center for his drug test and physical in the first place!

He has a new job training to be a manager with a competing company. This is a life changing event, so you can bet your bottom dollar I will be pouring over his medical plans and not letting him go in to a HDHP again!

I hope you learned something from our experience and my notes above.

Thanks for reading.

XOXO,

 

Dolores