Inside: This month was rough in some areas, and fantastic in other areas. PLUS, check out our shiny new spreadsheets and charts!
Hello and welcome to the third installment of our monthly Financial Progress reports! I’m still learning a good method to do these. This month I messed up a little bit and didn’t write down my deets at the very end of April—April 30th.
Most of our loan payments are taken out on the first of the month, so this month’s report is actually like two months worth of financial progress.
But fear not: I have some great news. Since this is the third month in a row, guess what that means?
EXCEL SPREADSHEET CHART TIME!!! #datanerd
That’s right—two data points aren’t much fun, but three data points show a pattern. I learned that little fact in science school. Pack that up and put it in your back pocket.
Fun fact: There are three things I love in life more than a good spreadsheet: Zach, craft beer, and crushing the patriarchy.
So, without further ado, let’s see how our last (two) months went!
Debt: $93,446
Damn.
Sonofabitch.
We’re in more debt now than when we started our financial progress reports. In fact, we did have to take out a personal loan for $3,765.
Why?
Zach’s decided to go to coding school, a bootcamp called General Assembly in Seattle starting in July. By paying it in full now, we could get a $400 early-pay discount.
We already had $8,000 saved and just needed another $3,765 to top it off, so we took out a loan for it. Here’s how the conversation went with the loan rep:
Loan rep: Do you want to take out more money, you know, for a buffer?
Me: No thank you, just the $3,765.
Loan rep: How about stretching your payments out to five years? Just in case something happens, that’ll keep your payment lower. But it will give you a slightly higher interest rate.
Me: Nope nope. We just want the lowest interest rate possible. (what I was thinking: Money harpy! Stop trying to sell me on shit I don’t need!)
We’ll have the loan entirely paid off within a few months from now. Not in three years. Take that, loan company.
Here’s the full breakdown of how our debt situation plays into our long-term financial picture, according to our free Undebt.it account:
Notice that it says it’ll take us about 8 ½ years to get out of debt.
Methinks not.
Challenge accepted.
Savings: $101,081.90
Pew-pew!
Hot damn, son!
We’ve been doing a fantastic job with our savings lately.
Let’s break it down like an old-timey jig:
So, we’re not so good with our retirement savings…
Welp, if we’re growing our savings, it sure as hell isn’t coming from our retirement accounts.
But, I’ll have you notice that wee bump on my (orange) retirement savings line at the end. I just opened a shiny, brand-spanking-new SEP IRA with Vanguard.
I think you can tell that my retirement savings are a little…uh…lackluster compared to Zach’s highroller funds (and even those aren’t where they should be according to our ages). Truth be told, I’ve only been saving a measly $50 per month in my Roth IRA for the past couple of years since I’ve still been ramping up my income in my business.
Now that I’m earning more, I figured it was time to start bumping up my savings. So, I’m setting aside 10% of all my business earnings to go into my SEP IRA.
Here’s one thing that surprised me: I thought I would be sad and miss the money that I’m locking away till I look like the Cryptkeeper. Instead, watching my SEP IRA balance double this month has me feeling way more empowered.
IMMA BE SUCH A BADASS OLD LADY, YOU GUYS! Ain’t no one got time for brokesville when I’ll be zooming around on fast scooters and pantsing people. It’s gonna take a pretty pile of money to get a scooter fast enough to outrun the cops.
Retirement savings is only one part of the whole savings picture, however:
#Winning
Another area where we are doing well is with our individual savings pots. We finally managed to top off our Oh Shit Fund last month (most normal people would call this an “emergency fund”), and now we’re ticking upward on our other savings.
In fact, here’s how our house savings fund is currently going:
The stock market is seriously messing with our Fuck Renting Fund
We’re working towards saving a minimum of $50,000 towards a house down payment. Currently, we’re about 7% of the way there.
We’re saving up our down payment fund with index funds because I want to experiment, it’s gonna be a hella long time until we actually need the money, and because I really like M1 Finance.
Net Worth – $37,056
Whelp, double damn…
Thanks to shelling out $8,000 for Zach’s coding school and the new personal loan, our net worth actually took a dive this month. Sadly, our boosted savings were not able to overcome that dip in an epic Godzilla vs. (insert literally any random monster here) battle.
That’s OK. We’re not anticipating any huge expenses that we haven’t saved for in the next several months.
Famous last words.
Side note: if you’re interested in tracking your net worth but don’t want to mess with spreadsheets, you can get a free personal financial tracker from Personal Capital that updates your accounts automatically. I use that one too because I’m a dork:
Ta da!
How did your April go? Anything particularly good or bad? Leave a comment below!
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