I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘NCN Charts’ Category

A few weeks ago, I made the decision to, for a short time, change our financial focus from primarily debt reduction to a mix of debt reduction and saving. Until our emergency fund is at $2000, all my snowflakes will be split evenly between our emergency fund account and our student loan payoff fund.  This was the first month I have put that into action (since everything last month went towards the purchase and installation of the new furnace), so yesterday I snowflaked $446.33 to my spouse’s student loan, and put the same amount in our emergency fund.  The emergency fund now stands at $1446.41.  Gotta love the $0.08 in interest I earned last month.  :)  Added to the debt snowball minimum of $437.59 I pay to that student loan every month, my total payment was $883.92.

When I went to redo my numbers, and recalculate the percentage of debt we have paid off, I saw that we are now at 39.95% of the original debt (as of June 2007) paid off.  It made me wish a little that we were more flexible in our payment ability for these loans, because I wanted to go pay another $19 and throw us over the 40% mark.  But I found when I did the payment from my Revolution Money Exchange bonuses last month, that for the Sallie Mae loan online, my payment has to be assigned to a “payment group” which is a minimum monthly payment - so if I make more than one payment in a month, I advance my payment due date by a month each time I make at least a full monthly payment.  I don’t want to do that, so I will only be making payments to the student loan once a month.

With that, here are the numbers:

Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71

Current total as of 05/12/08: $21,888.57

Principal paid to date $14,563.14

Broken down into:

• Credit Card: PAID OFF 2/7/08

• Student loan (at 7%): $11,467.76

• Spouse student loan (at 9%): $7940.54 (made payment of $883.92)

• Car loan (at 4%): $2480.27

NCN Network Chart %:  39.95% (last week 37.65%)

When I think about the fact that we have paid over $14,000 to the principal amount of our debt in the past 11 months…  well, that is great but it is also depressing.  That is a LOT of money we could have done a lot with.  Yikes.  But hey, the spouse’s student loan is now under $8000!  And only about $22,000 let to pay before we are free of non-mortgage debt…

Someone asked me earlier if I thought we’d get to the debt halfway point by the blog’s first anniversary.  Then I was slightly hopeful, but now after the furnace, I think it will be a bit later than that.  We’d have to pay about $3700 to debt in the next month… hey - just about exactly what the furnace cost… heh.  But soon!  I have some survey income I just received that will go towards debt for the next month, and I’ll have some blog-related income and another check from taekwondo before next week.  We will definitely be over 40% paid off next week - just by paying the minimum payments on the car and my student loan!

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Last week, I put up a poll for which debt my Revolution Money Exchange referral bonus should go to, and throughout the week, readers voted. With just over 50% of the vote, my spouse’s student loan (our highest interest debt) won, and this morning, I made a $645 payment to that loan ($525 in RME bonuses and $120 in other money I had saved in the student loan payoff account). Thanks for voting! Coupled with making a car payment last week, this is how the numbers look as of today:

• Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71
  Current total as of 04/22/08: $22,729.06
  Principal paid to date: $13,722.65
  Broken down into:
  • • Credit Card: PAID OFF 2/7/08
    • Student loan (at 7%): $11,467.76
    • Spouse student loan (at 9%): $8781.03
    • Car loan (at 4%): $2480.27
• % of original debt paid off from NCN Network Chart: 37.65% (last week 35.38%)

Everything is trending steadily downwards! If you missed out on getting a $25 bonus from Revolution Money Exchange and you wanted to, don’t despair - RME extended their bonus period to May 15th! My spouse has decided he wants in on the action (I think he thinks the readers would choose for his bonus to go towards a Playstation 3 instead of towards debt… hah hah). So I have my spouse’s referral banner up, and May 15th I’ll post how much he earned and a poll to decide if he gets to put more towards his PS3 or he pays off more of our debt. I’m guessing debt. We’ll see. Revolution Money Exchange is like PayPal in that it is a person to person money transfer service - it has drawbacks (like the money needs to be in your RME account, no direct debit or credit transfers) but there are no fees for transactions which is an improvement over paypal for me. They are offering a $25 bonus for opening an account (your referrer gets $10 as well), and you can sign up by clicking the banner below:

Again, no pressure from me to sign up if you’re not interested or don’t want to open another account - but if you are interested, feel free to use my spouse’s referral. I’ve used it once for a person to person transfer, as well as transferred money to my bank account three times from the RME account, and I am going to use it again this week for a person to person transfer instead of paypal. I’ll write an in depth review soon of what I see, for me, as the pros and cons of the service. For me, I think in many situations it is a very viable alternative to paypal and I hope it catches on. I don’t mind paying fees to paypal when the payer uses a credit card, but the fact that I pay fees for everything with paypal really bothers me.

With my new taekwondo position, we are using a lot more gas than we used to. Not to mention, gas is more expensive than ever! I need to figure out how much of my taekwondo salary needs to go into our budget for rising expenses, and how much can go towards debt. I hope to figure that out this week, and then put more money from my April paycheck into the student loan payoff fund. I like that every time I make a payment, it seems the balance goes down by a number in the thousands place. It is really starting to feel real that we will get this loan paid off before the end of the year. Maybe by the time the car loan ends (March 2009) we’ll have paid off the rest of our debt as well. That is more than a stretch at this point, but anything is possible.

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Well, today is the last day for the Revolution Money exchange $25 bonus for signing up. I said when I posted my referral code, that whatever I made from referrals, I would let the readers decide which debt I apply it to. The great news is I maxed out my 50 referrals so I have $525 to apply to one of our three remaining debts. Yay! And if you still need a referral for RME, I replaced my referral banner with Emily’s from Remodeling This Life (with her permission of course!) so that anyone who wants a referral still will get one. Without further ado, here is the poll:

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I will leave the poll open until next Tuesday, and then I will post what the readers decided and make a payment somewhere. Hurrah!

I didn’t make any new payments to debt this week, so my total % paid off remains 35.38%. I did receive $50 from My Survey that is now in the student loan payoff fund. I will also be making a car payment this week which will lower the debt total before next week. And then next week I will be making a $525 payment to something! I am excited to find out to what.

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Not the entire debt total - that would be incredible and I would be throwing a (frugal) party - but this week the spouse’s student loan total crossed the four figure mark. It’s amazing - I never considered before I started this blog that we’d ever get to the point of paying off the student loans early. But with my new part-time position as well as the other things I have been doing to earn snowflakes, we are making huge progress on my spouse’s student loan and I hope to have it completely paid off this year. Even with the new position that is a bit of a stretch right now based on our current pace, but it is definitely much more possible than I ever thought it was.

So on to this week’s numbers:

Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71

Current total as of 04/05/08: $23,555.86

Principal paid to date: $12,895.85

Broken down into:

• Credit Card: PAID OFF 2/7/08

• Student loan: $11,467.76 (made $144.50 minimum payment)

• Spouse student loan: $9388.39 (made $1281.54 payment)

• Car loan: $2699.71

% of debt paid off (from NCN Network Chart) : 35.38% (last week 31.84%).

I’ve had a kind of weird side effect to starting on the student loans - I am having pangs of jealousy about the fact that my spouse’s student loans are disappearing and mine are basically standing still. It is a totally irrational feeling - we chose this order together based on interest rates, but still I have the feeling. I told my spouse about it and he said we can switch to my student loan but then he doesn’t want to hear me complaining that we’re wasting money on interest. We are going to stay the course and pay them off in interest-rate order, but now I know what it feels like to attack a debt that isn’t really your most hated one left.

Our percentage paid off is now a bit over 35%, and I loved the new graph so much I printed it out and put it on my desk. There is just so much yellow (paid off)! The graphic is really starting to feel motivating.

One side effect of putting the snowflaking money into a separate account to collect it and then using it all at once a single time a month, is that I start to forget where the money came from in the first place by the time I use it to pay down debt. I could look it up on our budget sheet under income and figure it out, but I am semi-lazy. I know this $1281.54 payment is a combination of my new position, blogging, MySurvey payouts, and maybe some other miscellaneous survey sites, as well as our $437.59 budgeted minimum. Oh, and the $0.11 in interest the money that was waiting in the savings account earned last month. If we can continue to make ~$1300 payments each month, we should be able to knock the spouse student loan debt out by December. Onward and upward!

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March was an interesting month. This is the first month since my contracting position ended abruptly in October that we got completely back on track with diverting all of the blogging and other “alternative” income, save tutoring, solely to debt reduction. In November and December, that income had to fill the gap left by the contracting position, and then in January and February it was diverted in part or in whole to the car repairs. In March, only my spouse’s salary and my tutoring income were put into our budget to meet expenses, while all other income was snowflaked to my spouse’s student loan or put into the student loan payoff savings fund to snowflake in April. Which had an interesting result:

• All sources of inflow exceeded all sources of outflow (including money to savings or snowflaking) by $289.72.
• We need to carry over $201.45 for irregular expenses into April.
• That leaves a $88.27 surplus, it seems.

However, that inflow includes a $100 check I received yesterday for my birthday from my parents. That is going to be moved to a savings account until I decide what I want to do with it (in the spirit of giving myself wiggle room) so in fact, we’re actually $11.73 away from having a balanced budget this month. Which honestly, is better than I expected. I wasn’t able to tutor as much in February as I did in January and only earned ~$400 instead of $600. Since the budget depends on me bringing in $500/month to contribute to the budget to be able to have enough to carry over month to month for irregular expenses, the fact that it didn’t balance is not surprising, and only came so close because I was able to really cut back some other categories, especially the miscellaneous one. We did spend less than we earned, but we don’t have quite enough left over to cover what we need to save in our irregular categories. So we’ll have to save an additional $11.73 in April for irregular expenses.

We’ll be in the same position in April as we were in March, I again only earned about $400 from tutoring, so I may have to divert $100 of the taekwondo income to our budget. Since taekwondo is what is causing me to be able to tutor less than I was, it is the obvious place to make up the budget shortfall.

As far as the debt reduction front, I was able to transfer $98.48 to the student loan payoff fund, which brings the total in that fund to $214.48. Since it is the beginning of the month, I will be receiving payouts for different blog-related revenue this week, so I am hoping to be able to make another $1000 payment to the student loan next week (budgeted minimum of $437.59 plus ~$550-600 of alternative income). That will bring the student loan total to a 4 figure number. Hurrah!

Looking ahead, we should receive our economic stimulus check in the first half of May, and May is also one of my spouse’s two “three paycheck” months. Since I will be bringing in taekwondo income at that point as well, I am cautiously optimistic that we may be able to pay $4000 towards the student loan that month. That would put a huge dent in that debt and bring us a whole lot closer to being able to focus on our other financial goals. It is almost scary for me to even think too hard about being able to make that happen. But first, we will enjoy April.

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