Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I realize it's not officially the end of the month, but I assume you the reader want to read a blog post on Halloween as much as I want to write one. And I was excited to write this roundup as it's the first ever with a zero in a "amount owed" column due to the glorious fact that I paid off one of my student loans earlier this month.

And I wanted to share something I probably should have looked into earlier as it has previously taken me about 30 minutes of research to determine how much of my federal loans were applied to each year of study. Well, apparently if you go to the National Student Loan Database you can find all this info in a nifty little chart like this one that shows how much you borrowed each year:

It's small but organized and you can get your very own at the Department of Education website (minus the ghost). Anyway, it reminds me that nearly two years after writing the post about still paying off my freshman year of college that I am still, in fact, underwater on my federal student loans. I am going to calculate how long it will be before I am above water but I've already done a lot of math today. It's not like I'm snowballing the loans by year of study since I am paying the highest interest rate first, but still I want to know these milestones.

So here are this month's totals, knocking out over $1200 in debt:

Happy Halloween everyone!

P.S. if you are looking really closely, yes I made a math error in last month's post, which frustrated me all day long as things weren't adding up. I'm working on fixing it now. :-)

Trading Vacation Days for Cash

First: a warning. I know I'm going to sound like a whining whiner who whines, but I realize this and write anyway.

One of the great perks about my job is the generous amount of paid time off I get. And a lot of this time can be carried from year to year and used for a dream vacation, a maternity leave, or cashing out at retirement. I currently have 16 vacation days saved and that's after taking nearly three weeks off for my wedding and honeymoon in July. I accrue a new vacation day every two and a half weeks (or 4 weeks a year to be exact). On top of that I get a week of Personal time come January 1 of the new year. And I have 28 sick days accrued. There's more (overtime) but I'll stop bragging.

Anyway, I've always really appreciate this about my job and the fact that we aren't discouraged from actually using our time like so many Americans apparently are is something I don't take for granted. Sure, time off has to be approved but I've found as long as it's not during our crazy busy time of the year it is usually approved.

So when I got a notice saying that I could exchange 3 vacation days for $500 towards my my share of the health insurance premiums, I had to think about it.

First, I did the math. I make $1861 a pay period pretax. Out of that amount, $110 is taken out pretax towards my health insurance premiums for DH and I. $1861/10 = $186 a day x3 = $558.

Then, I thought, it's not like I'm actually earning more money if I'm working three more days a year for it. In fact, after taxes this will only net me like $10 a year if I consider the extra time worked. And isn't a vacation worth more to me than $10 a year?

I told all this to DH. He said I was using fuzzy math and I should take the money. When I pointed out that I could save up a lot of time for a potential two week African Safari in 2012, he told me there was no safari in our immediate future. :-(

Bubble bursted, I submitted the form to H.R. today.

I still want to go on that safari though, but DH is right that we have other financial goals we need to focus on instead.

Sorry lions.

Budget 10/27 - 11/09

Sometime in the next two weeks my sister will be giving birth and I will become an aunt! Yay! I mean, it's projected to happen soon, but who knows. This is the first sibling of mine to have a child so it's all pretty exciting. This has nothing to do with money really since I've already given plenty of loot to my unborn niece and nephew but I thought I'd mention it. :-)

Although I guess once it happens I may have to hop on a bus if DH can't come with me to visit my family. I'll think about that more in the days to come.

Exciting news - I opened up a new Roth I.R.A. last week. I know as part of my 2010 financial goals I listed maxing out my Roth, but I neglected to mention that I no longer had an active Roth account. Like the impulsive idiot that I was back then, I had opened up an account 5 years ago or so and started putting $50 a month into it. When times got tough, however, I drained all the money. :-(

The good thing about my new Roth account is that I opened it with the same firm my financial adviser works with so I have to actually mail him a check in order to make deposits, thus making it a whole lot harder to withdraw the money in a moment of weakness.

Anyway, with that explanation in mind, here is my projected budget for the next two weeks time:

Starting Balance = $1285

Roth I.R.A. - 500
Perkins Loan - 200
Credit Card - 200
Groceries - 150
Health - 45
Misc. - 190

I doubled my usual payment on the Perkins loan now that the Law School loan is gone.

I'm leaving some flex room in the budget in case I have to pay another doctor's co-pay or buy a bus ticket to see my sister.

Luckily (and not so luckily) Halloween is already taken care of courtesy of the spending spree.

It's pretty doubtful I will be able to come up with the entire $5000 by April 15th to max out my Roth...but I am now 1/10th of the way there so I consider that some progress. :-)

Here's hoping I can pull in some additional income in the next few weeks - more on that later.

Where it Went 10/13 - 10/26

Boo for this budget report. Not fun "boo" as in ghosts and Halloween but boo as in "boo hoo, I''m broke" or "my boo boo costs what?!"

After declaring I was gonna go out and spend some money, well, spend money I did. Then...I had a bit of a health scare, resulting in the following charges:

Urgent Care Center co-pay - $20
E.R. visit co-pay - $70
Prescriptions (including those not related to the health scare) - $20.
Grand Total = $110, which puts my total health care expenses at $180 in the PAST TWO WEEKS if you count the random $30 I owed my OBGYN.

Seriously boo to all of that. The Emergency Room is definitely a spooky place to spend your Saturday. And I don't even know if I will be charged a co-pay for my followup appointment today. Plus I went out and got some OTC things to help with my condition after the appointment. (Note that expenses today don't count towards the budget report, it's just aggravating.)

Anyway, the good news is I'm okay. And really considering opening up a Flex Spending Account since open enrollment season is coming up.

So here's where it went:

Projected/Actual

Sallie Mae - 407/407
Defaulted Student Loan - 260/260
Sprint - 74/74
Health - 60/180
Event Tickets - 60/60
Charity - 30/50
Groceries - 100/100
Clothes - 150/0
Misc. - 144/289




Booooo! Totaling everything up is scary. A lot of the miscellaneous is household stuff as I went on a kick of sprucing up our condo. But reality has set in and I'm done with shopping sprees for now. And I didn't even get any clothes!!!

I was able to earn $50 for consenting to take on another court assignment. I'm excited that these are coming in more frequently now as I definitely enjoyed spending the last $500 I earned. There may be more news in the area of additional income soonish so stay posted.

State of State Pensions Funds and an Update on Mine

I'm playing catch up on my 2010 goals and finally submitted the paperwork to buy back my pension credits. It wasn't so bad, I had to log into the site, print out the relevant form and mail it (yes snail mail) it back to the state.

The form required me to know my exact starting date at the job at which joining the pension system was optional (which is kinda b.s. because I know for a fact our H.R. director can pull up this info on me in the state's database already). So I called my former employer and got the exact dates.

And I happen to remember my exact salary even though they didn't ask for it. I did the math and 3% of 8 months should cost about $660 (go ahead and do the math backwards and find out my crappy old salary!).

Two weeks later I received a letter in the mail from the retirement system. I'm excited because I think it is going to give me instructions on how to buy the credits (the jury is still out on whether I can pay with pre-tax money). Nope. The letter acknowledged the receipt of my application and stated that they would begin an investigation into my prior service and determine the cost of buying it back. It estimated that this investigation would take five months.

Five months?!! What the heck?! Call up my former employer and ask if I worked there, for how long and how much did I make? Crappy salary/12 = Y x 8 = (Yx8) x 0.03 = $660. I barely survived high school math class and I was still able to figure this out in less than five minutes.

So it looks like this goal may not be achieved within 2010. Oh well, I guess I tried. I usually defend the state when people complain about bureacracy having seen the other side but I cannot even fathom why this inquiry should take so long.

At least New York's pension fund is currently in good shape unlike 11 states whose funds are in danger of running out. I *think* New York's will be okay since they recently enacted some reforms requiring newer (before me!) members to continue their contributions for the entire length of their employment (I only have to contribute for ten years).

But since I'm neither a mind reader nor an economist I am not putting all my retirement eggs in one basket. See more on that (as well as more on my 2010 goals progress) sometime later this week.

I Paid Off My Law School Loan!

Only one of them. Don't anybody get too excited! I still have five left to pay off.

I've been waiting to post this for days! As you could tell from my last "where it went" I made an extra big payment to my Law School Loan courtesy of the extra money I was able to earn doing some outside work. After I made the payment I logged into my account for the next couple of days to see when the account would say zero. Instead, I owed $3.11 in accrued interest. And so I paid that and then waited some more. Finally, I am able to share this exciting image:

And as luck would have it, the smallest of my student loans also had the highest interest rate. 8% is wack. I'm SO glad it's gone. This means in addition to paying off the closed credit card account back in April I have lowered my monthly debt obligations by $165 in 2010! Plus I'm about to start saving $35 a month in health care costs, which effectively means I have $200 more a month to work with.

Getting rid of this loan was on both my 2009 AND 2010 resolutions so I'm glad to meet this goal at last. Freedom!

I started paying this loan in November of 2008 and had 60 months to pay it off. By knocking it out in 23 months I saved $286 in interest. That doesn't seem like much but I'll take any victory I can get at this point.

Now time to snowball my Perkins Loan!

Budget 10/13 - 10/26

I've decided to call this budget the "okay fine, I'll admit to buying stuff" version. Instead of trying to spend almost every cent of my paycheck paying off debt and bills, I'm going to let myself plan for some purchases. Hopefully this will actually help the recent credit card problem because I have to use cash to get the things I want and need. Also I'm feeling a little burnt out.

I need new sweaters since, as I mentioned, moths have attacked mine. I need moth balls or moth hangars. I need flat shoes since mine are literally falling apart. I need a new coat. I want better bathroom storage. I could use a Halloween costume.

I'm not going to run out and buy all of those things in the next two weeks but I may buy a few and I"m not going to beat myself up about it. So there.

Here's my very lenient budget for the next two weeks. Most of the money going towards bills of course, but then some for me as well:

Starting Balance = $1285

Sallie Mae - 407
Defaulted Student Loan - 260
Sprint - 74
Health - 60*
Event Tickets - 60
Charity - 30
Groceries - 100
Clothes - 150
Misc. - 144

*I got a bill from my OB's office stating that I owed them $30 from November of last year. What the heck? This stuff always seems to happen with my doctors - I don't know why they don't bill me during the visit.

Where it Went 9/29 - 10/12

The great news about this budget report is that I was able to bring in $500 in additional income from a court assignment I received. The good news is that I paid off A LOT of debt.

The not so good news is that I also spent more money than I had planned, partly due to the windfall. And the bad news is that I still have a big credit card balance mocking me. I'm just gonna put this out there as I've sort of been evasive about the amount in the past month as I've been trying to attack it: I have $2700 in credit card debt. There I said it. It was actually quite a bit more a month ago. It's "only" at 8.9% interest rate but it's pissing me off and I want it gone as soon as possible.

So without further ado, I will show you how I spent my paycheck plus my windfall the past two weeks:

Budgeted/Actual

Credit Card - 700/700

Law School Loan - 200/434

Perkins Loan - 94/94

Health - 65/100

Gift - 60/60

Misc. - 167/180

Beauty - 0/59

Clothes - 0/198

Yeah yeah, I know. It's pretty bad. If I hadn't overpaid the law school loan so much I would have had money for the clothes. AND if I didn't have such a high credit card balance to work off I would have had money for both the loan AND the clothes. I just really wanted to use the windfall towards erasing debt and it did to a certain extent. Look for a big student loan announcement later this week.

Also I showed up at a doctor's appointment to find out that my health insurance decided not to cover my flu vaccination. What the heck? Luckily I think I am going to be able to reduce my prescription co-pays going forward so that will help a bit. It's also open enrollment time for Flex Spending Accounts so I am looking into that as well.

If all goes according to plan, I can have the credit card paid off by the end of the year. Wish me luck!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

I can't believe September has come and gone so quickly. It seems like just yesterday I was posting August's student loan debt roundup. Yet happily I was able to decrease the balance by over $1000 this month. Sometimes I make charts and spreadsheets and see how fast I could get rid of all my student loan debt and I get encouraged...until I realize that would mean ignoring all of our other financial goals. It's frustrating.

The good news, however, is that I am achingly close to paying off my first student loan! Because of my increased snowball, the balance stands at a measly $434.41. I hope knocking it out will give me the momentum I need to push harder at attacking the rest of the balances. (I also would like a raise but that's a whole other story.)

Anyway so here's my updated chart:



Thanks for reading and I hope we can celebrate the payoff of loan #1 soon!

Budget 9/29 - 10/12

I know people say "never again" a lot, but I'm saying this right now. Never again will I get sidetracked from my financial goals. I will keep this post as a reminder. Paying for meals you ate and whatever it is you did several months later stinks.

Wanna know why? Let me show you my new budget:

Starting Balance = $1285

Credit Card - 700 :-(
Law School Loan - 200
Perkins Loan - 94
Health - 65
Gift - 60
Misc. - 167

Why yes, most of my paycheck will be going towards my stupid credit card.

How much is $700? I mean other than some numbers on a page, what does it mean to me?

With $700 I could pay off the entire law school loan balance!

With $700 I could buy an I-pad with 3G wireless!

With $700 I could spend a three day weekend with my husband in Niagara Falls!

Oh well. At this rate the debt should be gone by mid-November. I doubt I'll be getting an i-pad any time soon - though I would love to travel to Niagara Falls. Check out this deal - if you have money that is!

Where it Went 915 - 9/28

Good morning! Isn't pay day great? :-)

Time to see how I spent my last paycheck before I go on a flurry of bill paying and budgeting. So here is where my money went compared to the budget I set:

Budgeted/Actual

Sallie Mae - 407/407

Defaulted Student Loan - 260/260

Credit Card - 200/200

Sprint - 74/74

Gift - 40/40

Health - 25/25

Clothes - 100/50

Charity - 20/20

Groceries - 0/30

Misc. - 152/155

Still working dilligently to get rid of our new and unwelcome consumer debt. I'm gonna pay off a bulk of it in a few minutes - that's gonna feel good - and next week I have a legal one time gig that is going to bring in some money too.

I didn't do a big clothes shopping excursion yet - just picked up a few things from Walmart which were suprisingly not cheap but I still need to soon as the weather gets warmer. Moths ate FOUR of my sweaters. I've never had moths before and I don't like them one bit.

Stay tuned for a new budget post!

2010 Financial Goals Checkup

Happy Fall everyone! The weather is getting cooler and things are finally slowing down for the newlyweds - at least for now. We spent three out of four weekends in September at home - which is sort of a record for us the past five months. At work I'm experiencing the "calm before the storm" and expect things to pick up significantly in the next couple of weeks.

And in a few days a six week period of family birthdays start up, including most likely the birth of my parent's first grandchild (I'm gonna be an aunt!), Thanksgiving and then the winter holidays.

But for now, I have a moment to reflect on the financial goals I set for 2010. Here's how I'm doing:

1. Get married without going into debt. Pass. We achieved this goal - however we did not save up enough money for the honeymoon and pretty much depleted our financial reserves which we're working now to build up.

2. Increase 457 contribution. Pass and Fail. I did increase my contribution for most of the year but lowered it when we decided it was more important to max out Roth IRAs.

3. Max out Roth IRAs. Fail. We're pretty focused on debt repayment right now but I'm still optimistic we can do this by April.

4. Buy Back Pension Credits. In progress. I just submitted the paperwork to do this last week.

5. Eliminate Law School Loan. In progress. The balance stands at $634 and hopefully will be down to zero by the end of the year.

So that's how I'm doing so far. I also changed my beneficiary to DH on several of my accounts.

Budget 9/15 - 9/28

After a long hiatus I've decided the honeymoon is over and I should put up a budget post. Note, however, that this budget only reflects my income and the bills I'm responsible for. The DH and I haven't changed the way we manage our money now that we're married though as always we talk about our money and mutual goals. I still transfer money to our joint savings account that we were using for the wedding, except now it's being used to pay off debt.

And about that....yeah, we managed to rack up some consumer debt. It's not terrible and we have a plan to eliminate it, but it puts some other goals on the back burner.

Anyway, here it is:

Starting Balance = $1277

Sallie Mae - 407
Defaulted Student Loan - 260
Credit Card - 200
Sprint - 74
Gift - 40
Health - 25
Clothes - 100
Charity - 20
Misc. - 152

I need some new clothes for the upcoming busy season at work and we have two weddings to attend in October.

My paycheck is a little less than normal because I'm now paying for health insurance for two. The good news is the amount I'm paying now doesn't increase if we add dependents in case we ever decide to make any little humans.

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Hello out there in blog land. I'm back and married and anxious to tell about my wedding, my fabulous honeymoon, my fine new husband and our married financial adventures. First, however, I bring you a monthly student loan debt roundup - only a day late after skipping the month of July.

Lest you think I ran off and changed my identity to avoid paying student loans forever, I am happy to report that in the past two months I have cleared over $1500 in debt. Here are the stats:



As you can see, since I started this spreadsheet on July 1, 2009 the total amount of student loan debt I've eliminated is $10,845.32!

Stay tuned for more in the chronicles of Sallie's Niece, the married version.

Budget 7/07 - 7/20

Since I need this paycheck to last me until the second day of my honeymoon I figured it was wise to write up a budget so I don't forget anything in the midst of wedding planning.

BTW I should have realized what I was going to get when I googled "two brides" but this image refers to a semi-financial quandry I am in. :-)

My friend is also getting married and her shower and bachellorette party are this weekend. I have already RSVPd yes to both events, but due to a death in a third friend's family I no longer have a way to get to them - five hours away. So...I'm trying to figure out what to do...and how much it will cost. So here's my worst case scenario budget:

Starting Balance = $1337

Sallie Mae - 406

Defaulted Student Loan - 260

Credit Card - 100

Sprint - 74

Health - 45

Shower gift - 60

Transportation and party misc. - 180

Wedding week & misc. - 212

Okay, so that's not too awful. Of course it doesn't take into account the vast amount of money we will spend during the week of the wedding but that is coming out of the separate wedding budget I've worked so hard on for the past year. Time to enjoy it!

Where it Went 6/23 - 7/06

Oh man, I NEED to write a budget post. With the wedding right around the corner I have to make sure everything is on track as today is my last payday of my single life.

Luckily just sorting through the last pay period's expenses it seems I didn't get too far off track - save for maybe giving my little sister a $200 graduation present (cash) but I'd have given her $2000 if I had it so there's no trying to talk sense into me after the fact.

So here's where my money went for the past two weeks, just for accountability purposes since I didn't bother to post a budget in the first place. :-(

Starting Balance = $1416

Wedding Savings - 500
Gift - 200
Credit Card - 150
Perkins Loan -93
Law School Loan - 80
Clothes - 60
Health - 40
Wedding Spending - 32
Misc. - 120

I got some clothes to wear on the honeymoon at Old Navy - yay for $5 t-shirts!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Wow, how is it the end of June already? Do you know what this means? This is my last monthly student loan debt roundup as a single gal! Yay!

There probably won't be a July roundup as I will be sitting on a beach in Hawaii next to my new husband, but in the meantime here's the current numbers:

Where it Went 5/26 - 6/08

Wedding. Money. Life. Stress.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. How is everyone else doing?

I'm pretty good, especially knowing that even with the daily stressors of planning a wedding, that I will be married to the man I love soon....and then boarding a plane to Hawaii. Can't wait!

So here's where my money went for the past two weeks compared to the budget I set:



Budgeted/Actual

Credit Card - 150/200
Wedding Savings - 700/700
Wedding Makeup Deposit - 50/50
Perkins Loan - 93/93
Law School Loan - 80/80
Groceries - 75/0
Healthcare - 40/40
Misc. - 149/160
Clothes - 0/40




I got a dress I may wear to my rehearsal and one I will definitely wear on the honeymoon. Found a really great discount shop a few towns over. Resisted urge to spend more than the $40 in my wallet.



This weekend I have what I hope will be my last dress fitting and then my hair and makeup trial. It's really getting close!

Monthly Student Loan Debt Roundup

Technically Monday is the end of the month, but I'll be enjoying a relaxing day off from work, so I figured I would do my monthly student loan roundup a few days early. It may skew the numbers a bit on the loans where they update the interest daily...but you get to see the basic picture..the balances are going down down down! My law school loan now stands at less than $1000. I can't wait to kiss that sucker goodbye!

Here are this month's numbers:




Have a Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!

Budget 5/26 - 6/8

I can't believe it's almost June! Which means, among other things, it's almost time for me to get married. Wow! But that's not until July so I'm gonna take things one month at a time.

I need to be on top of my budget as the wedding nears so we can pay off all of our vendors and have money to spend on our honeymoon. I can't wait for Hawaii, I need a vacation.

Luckily, Memorial Day weekend is just around the corner so we do get a three day weekend. We're going camping with some friends.

So here is my budget for the next two weeks.

Starting Balance = $1337*

Credit Card - 150

Wedding Savings - 700

Wedding Makeup Deposit - 50

Perkins Loan - 93

Law School Loan - 80

Groceries - 75

Healthcare - 40

Misc. - 149

*Look at all that money. Did I get a raise, you ask? No. After speaking with our financial advisor, I decided to reduce my 457 contributions so that I can contribute more to a Roth I.R.A. first. I am still saving 2% pre-tax and will post more about the Roth later on.