August has been and gone, and I am happy to report we are back ahead of our original forecast. Lets get straight into the numbers this week!
| Forecast | August |
| Consolidation Loan | $ 9,170.42 |
| Credit Card A | $ 0 |
| Credit Card B | $ 4,293.21 |
| Credit Card C | $ 3,614.67 |
| Total | $ 17,078.30 |
| Actual | August |
| Consolidation Loan | $ 9,960.00 |
| Credit Card A | $ 0 |
| Credit Card B | $ 4,409.00 |
| Credit Card C | $ 3,790.00 |
| Total | $ 18,159.00 |
This position puts us $304.05 ahead of my original forecasts, but still $1,080.70 behind our revised forecast. It is pleasing this gap did close by $1600 over the past month. I am confident we will be able to claw back that gap over the coming months. Here is the visual representation:
It is great to see the slope of that red line increase! All things going well we are still on track to hit $0 by February 2020.
Net Worth
Despite it being a tough month for the stock market, with our combined super balances dropping around $2000, we have seen an increase in our net worth figure. Including HECS we are sitting on $60,352.02, and excluding HECS $83,555.42, represented below:
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How do you do the forecast? I would like to improve my spreadsheeting
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At this point I just calculate the reduction in the loan principal, based on how much we’ve budgeted to pay down per month, and then extrapolate that out until the principal is $0. This isn’t the most accurate method as it ignores the monthly interest the consolidation loan accrues. So in essence we’ve actually paid a bit more than the posts suggest.
If you wanted to know the exact amount you would need to figure out the daily rate of interest and apply that to the remaining principal, multiplied by the amount of days (for example 30 in the month). I couldn’t be bothered tinkering that much in excel, plus the other debt is interest free so I didn’t see much value in it. I can tell you the average interest on the consolidation loan over the last 12 months has been around $140 per month.
I’m hoping to have paid off Credit Card C by the end of September, then we will focus on the consolidation loan to ensure the interest expense is as low as possible.
I hope that helps?
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It looks like you’ve made some good progress in a year! It’s great to find another blog from someone who’s earlier on in their path to FIRE, and not already in the hundreds of thousands. My net worth is not far behind yours so it feels really relatable to me
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