We made it! We’re finally installed in Washington. Unfortunately our apartment still needed a ton of remodelling from the last tenants. This put my schedule behind for a while (and then I had to play catch-up with client work), but now holy Batman I’m back!
Another thing I hadn’t planned on was the amount of furniture we’d need in our new apartment. We had to get rid of a lot of stuff in Colorado, like our bookcases, my “desk” (aka the kitchen counter), and the couch.
Fun fact: to get a couch out of our old apartment, you have to saw it in half. Apparently we somehow ship-in-a-bottled that couch inside in the first place.
Aside from driving the delivery man crazy with all the stops they’ve been making to our apartment (Amazon is so fast when you live near Seattle!), it’s been doing a number on our budget. Luckily I saved up an extra few thousand dollars before we left Colorado in the event we needed to buy new furniture, and hold wah, I was right.
This won’t set us behind too much (happily), but it will cut into our debt repayment plans. I’d planned on paying off some of our debt with whatever was left over, and with each new furniture purchase, that’s a little less that’ll be going towards debt.
Debt: $93,044.05
Now that’s what I like to see! We finally went in the negative direction with our debt this month. Now if only we can stop spending all the monies on furniture so that we have some leftover to make our first big chunk payment.
We should finally be paying off our first loan next month too. It’s the one with the biggest payment: LendingClub, at $372 per month. that we’ll be able to roll that puppy into a big-ass snowball that we’ll start using to pay off the rest of our debts.
I’ve never been so excited to pay a debt in my LIFE!
Related: Undebt.it is without a doubt the best free tool to track your debt progress. It’s got so many fancy stats!
In other news, we finally tipped over the 25% mark! Only 75% more to go…
And I’ll be damned if it’s going to take me 8 ½ years to get there.
Savings: 103,003.95
Whut whuuuut?
Even despite our expensive moving trip, we’ve managed to sock away some funds. Of course, part of that is because I threw a bunch of extra money in our GTFOCO fund which we’ll be depleting soon — either in furniture or in debt payoffs.
Looks like Zach’s retirement took a bit of a dip from the stock market. Or so that’s what people who know about these things tell me.
My retirement account, on the other hand, is spiffy and shiny and growing. Mostly because I’ve been putting away 10% of all the money I’m making in my freelance writing business. It’s the most I’ve ever put away, and once our debt is paid off, I’m planning on bumping up that number even higher.
Related: We’re investing our home down payment fund through M1 Finance because it’s another great free tool, and it’ll be approximately 1,000 years until we can buy a house.
Still got a while before we can buy a house. We’ll be doing it the right way this time, with a 20% down payment.
Fun fact: if we put 20% down right now, we could afford a house worth $20,414.10.
We’re steady-Freddy with our other savings so far. Like I said earlier, we’re expecting the yellow line to tank soon after we raid that for furniture and/or debt payments. We sure as hell don’t need that much furniture, so stay tuned for next month’s financial progress report to see how much we actually end up putting towards our debt!
Net Worth: 37,562
Ha! Our graph looks like a caterpillar.
We’d prefer it to be an arrow pointing upwards. But still, ya gotta take your victories where you can see them.
Related: Personal Capital has my favorite net worth tracker that automatically updates, and it’s FREE!
Hopefully next month we’ll have some upward points to add.
Tune in to find out!
How did your month go? Any questions about ours? And for fuck’s sake can you tell me WHY a Washington state license plate is needed to get a driver’s license, but you need a Washington state driver’s license to get a Washington state license plate?
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the smidlap family has a few miles under our belts and here’s what i’ve learned about furniture: a good bed is a 10 on 1-10 scale of importance if it helps you rest better. all the rest is low on the scale of what is worth the money. our kitchen table came from the curb. almost everything else is used but of good quality and was free/cheap (except a leather sofa i bought with winnings from a horse wager).
i wrote a lot about owning a big ol’ f’ing house, which cost us much maintenance in the past 2 years. we put some of it off when times were good, but you want to know what’s on/under the roof. hey, on the bright side a positive net worth is pretty darned good. 2 full time jobs for about 10 years did wonders for getting rid of debt and building the snowball on the good side of the ledger. good luck.
Great job making progress on the debt. You are the first person that I have heard of using lending club from the borrowers perspective.
I’m a little confused on your saving graph is. It doesn’t seem to line up with your personal capital snapshot or make sense with your comment about a down payment. If you have over $100k in savings that’s enough for a down payment on a $500k house.
Thanks Kit! I’d definitely prefer to be on the other end of the loans, but I’m glad to be outta that spot now.
We do have over $100k in savings, but that’s not all in one lump, undefined sum. Most of it is in retirement savings, and the rest is divvied up between emergency savings, new car savings, current car auto repair savings, etc.. We could plunk down a down payment on a pretty house right now, but then we’d be totally unprotected elsewhere (not to mention never being able to retire…which is something we both definitely want to do, haha).
Good question!