My birthday is in February, and anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE birthdays. This year I celebrated by attending hot yoga class, getting a massage, and having a special family birthday dinner. Due to all the birthday festivities, planning for our spring break trip, and just life in general, I missed a February (and beginning of March) debt free journey update. So today is March 26th. I think I’m going to move our updates to the end of the month after we’ve paid all our bills and put extra money toward things if possible.
Progress is slow
After calculating the numbers today, I am excited about our progress so far. A few things have come up since the beginning of January that have taken away from our ability to put a ton of extra money towards our debt, but we’ve still made an improvement. From January until now, we’ve paid $3,144.99 towards our debt. Here are all of the “life” things that came up.
- LJ ER visit ($700+)
- Car repair ($2150)
- LJ ear tube surgery ($800)
- My wisdom teeth removal ($500)
- Misc medical bills ($200)
- Travis’s extra flights to and from CA ($500)
We don’t typically pay our medical bills in full right away. I usually pay them in 2-5 installments depending on how much they are. For example, I paid $500+ out of pocket before my wisdom teeth surgery. Insurance was estimated to cover the rest, but it didn’t, so I got another $600 bill in the mail. I’ve been paying it off ~$100/month. The car was a huge expense that couldn’t wait. We are grateful that Travis’s parents paid for it, and we have paid them ~1200 back so far.
Our sweet boy right before surgery
Emergency Fund
Last year we set up an emergency fund with our financial adviser through Northwestern Mutual. We put $250 a month aside until we reached $1000 (baby step one), and then began to put $100/month toward it. Due to all the medical bills and flight nonsense that came up in February and March, we pulled $1000 out to put towards those expenses. We’re now putting in $200 a month until we reach that $1000 goal again.
In the past when we have worked on paying off our debt we often skipped baby step one. It was really hard for me to see money in our savings account and not touch it if I felt like we “needed” it. Having a separate account through Northwestern Mutual that automatically withdraws makes saving so much easier. Out of sight, out of mind works way better for us. It also takes a few days to take money out of the account, so we have time to think about whether something is actually an “emergency” or not. On our Debt Free Journey, this has definitely been one of my big “aha” moments.
Enjoying the sunshine and family in California
Victories
The most exciting thing about our March debt free journey is that we completely PAID OFF one of Travis’s student loans! It feels so good to be able to cross something off our list. We had made our typical payment, but when I logged on to check the current balance and realized we only owed less that $50 bucks I just payed it off!
Consolidating our credit card debt with a loan from SoFi (*referral link) has benefitted us as well. Instead of paying a couple hundred dollars in interest every month, we can use that money to directly pay for other things. A huge plus for me is also that I don’t have to log in to multiple accounts to figure out the balance/interest rate/payment due date/etc. I just log in to SoFi and it’s all there. We also had a little bit of money left over at the end of the month, so we made an extra payment ($120) to SoFi. Win!
Grand Total
Here’s the current breakdown of our debt and the grand total.
- Wedding Loan: $5,297.10
- Credit card 1: $440.00
- SoFi Loan: $15,892.22
- Nelnet: $21,005.93
- Heartland $3,788.32
- Fedloan: $3,638.97
- GRAND TOTAL: $50,062.54
We have paid off Number of our debt so far this year. You can read more about where we started at here. March has been a decent debt free journey month. I’m planning on working more on Baby Step two after our emergency fun is back to $1000.
We returned from our California trip on March 14th, and in an abundance of caution, chose to stay home for 14 days to make sure we didn’t develop any Covid symptoms. After being off work for a week already, this will definitely reduce our monthly income. I’m confident we can meet our normal obligations on just Travis’s salary alone. April will be interesting!
Are you worried about the effects Covid19 may have on your finances? What are you doing to prepare for the ever changing current situation?
Stay home & stay healthy,
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