Welcome, my friends, to Go Science Finance’s first monthly report. We’re gonna give you a sneak peak behind three things that no one except weirdo personal finance bloggers talk about: our debt, our savings, and our net worth.
Why start now, two years into the blog?
Good question.
Why start a monthly report now?
I’ve been wanting to do a monthly report on something for a while. Many bloggers do monthly blog reports, but most of my readers aren’t bloggers. So, I’m not going to be one of those bloggers who blogs about blogging. (If you’re one of those weirdo bloggers, it’s 9,671. That’s how many page views I got last month. There. I did it.)
Instead, most of my readers are interested in real financial numbers. Knowing what someone else’s debt, savings, and net worth situation looks like is way more useful.
But, for the first two years of the blog, it probably wouldn’t have been very interesting. Despite all my high-falutin’ efforts to help you get out of debt, I haven’t been very good at it myself. In fact, since I even started on my personal finance journey, I’ve only been making the minimum payments on my debt.
Pretty soon, that stops. Those of you following our plan to balance debt vs. savings know that we’re working on saving up our emergency fund first. Once that’s done, we’re going into full-on, debt-slaying mode. And, hopefully pretty soon, that’ll happen. Our emergency fund should be topped off here in the next month or two.
So, the only question is, ARE YOU READY?
Debt: $91,982
I use this totally awesome, free tool called Undebt.it to track my debt progress. It gives me all these neat stats, like how long it’ll take us to be debt-free (9 years and 7 months—whaaaat?!) and how much money we’re paying each month in interest ($306.27—double fuck).
If that’s not a swift kick in the ass to get out of debt, I don’t know what is.
The really sad thing is that you can’t even see all of our debts on this scrolling list—there’s three more of Zach’s student loans listed under there that we haven’t started paying back yet.
But, let’s see what we can do in the future to pay off our debt faster.
Savings: $88,643.12
We are obsessive savers. Probably because we’ve been visited enough times by ghosts of mistakes past (*cough* our old Alaska house and my old truck *cough*).
My favorite Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, used to say “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Well, to hell with that. I’m going to carry an assault rifle against surprise expenses.
Some of our savings are in investment accounts (like our retirement funds and our Fuck Renting Fund), some are in separate bank accounts (like our Oh Shit Fund), and others exist just as line items on our budget. Here’s what we got:
- Zach’s retirement accounts: $61,720.38
- Lindsay’s retirement accounts: $11,739.24
- Oh Shit Fund: $4,315.16
- Fuck Renting Fund: $3,259.21
- Badass Next Car: $2,700
- GTFOCO Fund: $2,640
- Truck repairs: $1,319.76
- Birthdays: $450
- Pets: $200
- Christmas: $169.25
- Travel: $12
This month, I’d also like to call out our Fuck Renting Fund specifically. Some less-exciting people would call this a house down payment fund, but fuck that. We use cuss words ‘round here.
If you’d like to subscribe to my newsletter to hear what I have to say about other savings accounts in the future, click here.
We have our Fuck Renting Fund invested in the stock market through M1 Finance because a) it’ll earn more money there over the long run, and b) we don’t expect to need this cash until we’re approximately 142 years old. Or at least for the next five years.
We used to have a positive rate of return until the stock market went out for too many bad tacos recently and crapped its pants. However, this isn’t deterring us. We’re still socking away $100 per month, regardless of whether the stock market’s being a drama queen at the moment or not.
Fun fact about our future house: it’s going to have a gigantic river stone fireplace where I can hang up my old racing dogsled as a decoration. Take that, dude who beat me out for second place in the four-dog sport class at the 2003 Kalkaska Winterfest.
Net Worth: $26,764
My other favorite free tool is Personal Capital. You can automagically link up your accounts so you don’t even need to enter in any information (sadly, however, it doesn’t give you an in-depth look at your debt like Undebt.it).
We went from having a negative worth for most of 2017 to finally hitting the black in August 2017. It only took me until I was 30 years old, after all. Time to be a grownup and not use swearwords plot my revenge against being broke AF.
I’d also like to point out that while we’ve come a long way, we’re still only slightly above average. I find this especially impressive considering that my chosen career—wildlife biology—generally pays people in peanuts, cool photos, and well-wishes, and one of us has always been in college since we were married.
Still, we’re bringing down the curve for the Rockstar Finance net worth tracker. But, give us some time, and we’ll skew upward.
Related Post: Diversify Your Income And Avoid Financial Extinction
Do you have any questions about our financial strategy? Leave a comment below, and I’ll get back to you!
I love the names of your savings accounts. Haha. One of my savings accounts is labeled “future fund”. My general consensus is to either use it for a house downpayment, to build a tiny house, or to buy a car in cash.
Does Personal Capital work fine for you? I’ve heard from some people that in the past few months it’s been having glitches with connecting accounts.
Nice! I love the idea of a “future fund.”
Personal Capital does have some glitches, but not more so than other automatically-linking accounts (at least for me). It won’t link up with our auto loan because we actually haven’t signed up for online access to the account, so I just plug those numbers in manually each month when I get our loan statement. Sometimes it does have trouble linking up with our student loans, but if I pop in there and click a few buttons, it’ll usually work fine again. It’s not that much of a hassle that I’m willing to give up the awesome tracking features of Personal Capital.
I love that your funds are labeled in swear words. I can’t think about my finances either without swear words so it’s totally natural! I meant to do a monthly debt update, but I think I just let the last quarter of 2017 get the best of me. I’m inspired to put up my numbers again. I might even post my 2018 goals, which are not surprisingly, late again.
Haha, yes, swear words are sometimes necessary when talking about money! I didn’t know you posted a debt update too, I’ll check it out!
This is awesome, Lindsay! Congratulations on hitting net worth black in 2017!
Thanks!!
I recently signed up for Personal Capital and I linked most of my accounts, but M1 Finance doesn’t seem to be one of the options. Do you have your M1 account linked to PC?
Hi Jess! Yes, I’ve also had problems linking up my M1 Finance account. It seems it’s one of the few big accounts that don’t sync automatically with Personal Capital. You can still add it to your account, but it’ll have to be a manual account that you update by hand every so often. That’s what I do at least – I check Personal Capital and my M1 Finance account enough that it’s not too much of a bother for me. Kinda annoying, but I think the tool are still worth it.
Thanks for laying this out… it’s so interesting to see! Do you not use your savings to pay off your debt because it’s in a retirement/investment fund and so heavily taxed if taken out? Have you ever considered doing something drastic to pay off the debt like live in an RV? 🙂
We don’t use our savings to pay off our debt because we want it to stay in savings. There are a lot of people out there who’ve given every last penny they own towards their debt, but I’ve heard from many of them that they wished they kept some savings. We’re going through an especially unstable financial time right now (I’m freelancing, husband is graduating from school soon), and given our past history, we want to make sure we’re more than protected against financial surprises.
I have considered living in an RV! Sadly, I can’t get my husband on board. Or our cats and our dog. And all our stuff that my husband has collected over the years and doesn’t want to part with. 🙂
Interesting! Thanks for sharing and good luck to you! It’s really an amazing thing when people open up their finances for all to see…I think it inspires others and reminds people they are not alone. I lived in a car and a tent to pay off my debt with my boyfriend, but we are sort of crazy, haha 🙂 Definitely not for everyone 🙂
Nice job Lindsay! Sometimes tracking the path solve half problem. Always in search of a handy debt payoff tool. Thanks for sharing the name of the free tools.
Thanks, and you’re welcome! I love scoping out new tools.