February 2018 Financial Progress Report: N00b Edition

Inside: Check out our very first financial progress report. We finally spill the beans on our net worth, our savings, and our debt!

Welcome, my friends, to Notorious D.E.B.T.’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.

Do you have any questions about our financial strategy? Leave a comment below, and I’ll get back to you!

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