February has drawn to a close. An exciting month, where we took a week off to relax and unwind. Our holiday ended up costing us about $2k which was a little more than I expected, but we had a really good time and didn’t hold back from any activities. For anyone that hasn’t been to Fremantle WA, I highly recommend it!
Even with the additional expenditure for the holiday, and having car registration due this month (about $1k in total expenses), we managed to pay down $2,290.14. I received my scheduled pay increase, which has been very handy, adding an additional $800 to our post tax income.
Here are the numbers!
| Forecast | February |
| Consolidation Loan | $ 0 |
| Credit Card A | $ 0 |
| Credit Card B | $ 250.25 |
| Credit Card C | $ 0 |
| Total | $ 250.25 |
| Actual | February |
| Consolidation Loan | $ 0 |
| Credit Card A | $ 0 |
| Credit Card B | $ 3,673.00 |
| Credit Card C | $ 0 |
| Total | $ 3,673.00 |
As you can see we are a way off our revised forecast, to the tune of $3,422.77, but ahead of our original forecast by $2,465.30. I am extremely happy to report that the remaining $3,673 will be paid off in full by the end of March! This remaining debt is sitting on an interest free credit card. Our journey so far has been a combination of both the avalanche and snowball methods, changing methods at times to avoid the most interest costs possible. For instance, some of the larger interest free credit cards we had, we focused them down first to ensure they were paid off before reaching the end of their promotional period. In total it will have taken us 20 months since I began tracking, and writing this blog to completely eliminate our consumer debt, an amazing personal achievement for us considering the amount was roughly $60k in April 2018. I honestly don’t know how we were surviving with all the different payments to be made, with different timings. It was a massive psychological burden.
Here is the visual representation for the second last time:
That beautiful red line is almost at zero baby!
As we move further down the road towards our financial goals, I have decided to revise and simplify the graphs that I use. I figure that these last 20 odd blog posts serve as a good reminder of where we started, but make the data increasingly hard to read as it progresses. In the next post I will include our revised goals for 2020, and how we will track them. To put simply, I will start a new graph that tracks our monthly savings, as we build up an emergency fund. At this stage there is some uncertainty with my employment, I may have to move location towards the end of the year, so our current goal for 2020 is to save $35k by the end of December. This would mean we are saving over $4k a month, but given my increased income and our renewed motivation (I have been in debt since I was 18, yes my whole working life as an adult, over 12 years!) I think that is definitely achievable.
Net Worth
Our net worth has continued to make steady progress, and I have decided to stop reporting on HECs debt as I figure it is simply an extra tax burden for myself, in the name of simplicity, the new net worth graphs and figures will simply be our total assets – total liabilities (not including HECs liability). Currently as you are probably aware our only assets are Super, which I think still bears some relevance even though our retirement goals are much before preservation age.
Our net worth currently sits at $113,508.56, an increase of $5,039.61 on last month. The coronavirus has hit markets globally, with fears of impacts to supply and manufacturing over the coming months, so it will be interesting to see what impact that has on our super balances. Below is our revised net worth graph, I have removed net worth including HECs and changed the date axis to only include 3 month intervals, again for simplicity:
I will see you at the end of March for what I am sure will be the end of our consumer debt woes!
Follow us on the path to FIRE 