Debt & Net Worth Update: January 2024

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Photo by Alexander Grey

And we are back with another debt and net worth update!

Happy New Year! I love new beginnings which makes me love this time of year.

I hadn’t looked at our numbers in a while to it was nice to get my trackers all updated for this blog post. I am pleasantly surprised with our progress!

Here’s the detailed look 👀

*2022 has some missing fields because I wasn’t tracking things as closely as I have been recently

Debts

I added a “non-mortgage debt total:” line this month because I wanted to see how much debt we have paid off since we started this journey in 2022 not including our mortgage.

In total, we have paid off $40,603.56 since May 2022 💥

It’s so gratifying to see our net worth increase! Decrease? I don’t know how to phrase it since we are still in the negative … lol

Student loans: We are trucking along with paying down our student loans. We have decreased our balance by $23,272.40 since May 2022. Pretty amazing!

Our goal is to have all our student loans paid off by summerish of 2028. We will likely have sold our house by then too, so we will hopefully be completely DEBT FREE!

Mortgage: We still don’t feel the need to pay down our mortgage as quickly as possible because we have a 3% interest rate and like I mentioned above, we will likely be selling in the next 1-3 years so no need to pay it down.

I recently took a look at how our mortgage payment is split up and I was very annoyed to see that most of the $1,603.22 we pay every month (not including our $107/mo HOA fee) goes to interest… ?

$577.91 goes to the principal
$703.77 goes to interest
$321.54 goes to taxes and insurance

I wonder if there is a way to tell the bank to put most of it toward the principal? I haven’t heard of anything like that. If you’re reading this and you know something about this — please let me know!

Credit cards and other debt: Currently our only debt is our mortgage and student loans.

Assets

Cash: Our goal last year was to build up a $16k emergency fund and we ended up with $5k!

We have a variety of cash in other sinking funds like taxes for this year and the two tattoos I’m getting this month… so I feel like our cash balance is a little higher for those reasons.

Investments: We crossed $35k invested last year! I have only been able to invest in my employer retirement plan up to the match and nothing more. I am hoping we can make some Roth IRA contributions this year, but we shall see.

Home value: Our most recent appraisal was in 2022, and it was valued at $415,000 so I am going to continue to use that number to calculate our net worth for the foreseeable future as we don’t currently plan and/or have a need for getting an updated appraisal.

Looking forward

I am really proud of our money habits in the year 2023 and our continued progress towards becoming debt free, and ultimately financially independent.

I have read many times on the internet that a life hack is marrying the right person and I certainly did.

I appreciate the way we can have open and healthy communication about money and our goals for the future. We are typically on the same page with those things which is nice.

Money goals for 2024:

Keep working on that emergency fund — hoping for somewhere between $10k and $16k
Continue paying on student loans
Continue investing in my 403(b) account up to the employer match
Don’t take on any more debt (We took out some student loans last year… if you missed it, you can read about it here.)

5-year money goal: be debt free and have $100k in investments!

Thanks for reading!