Today, I wanted to post a snapshot of my financial status as of right now. I need to know exactly where I am and where I want to be to come up with a game plan and keep progress. I must admit that it is a little scary and embarrassing to put my financial status out there with all the mismanagement and ignorance lumped into this final result. But this is why I started this blog. To acknowledge my mistakes and be accountable so that I won’t have this problem in a few years (crossing my fingers right now).
Let me start with all my debt, including my husband’s of course. We are one after all. I have about $19,100.00 in student loans for my undergraduate degree. My husband has about $20,000.00, but it’s deferred since he started his MBA program in the Fall of 2012. We will have so much more student loan from his MBA education when he graduates, but I’m not going to think about that right now. It’ll only upset me and feel overwhelmed.
Next, I have about $6,700.00 left for my car loan and the last payment is supposed to be in October of 2014. My husband’s car loan still has around $13,200.00 and his car payment goes 7 months longer than my car. He financed his car for 5 1/2 years without a down payment. I didn’t think much of it at the time he was buying his car, because we weren’t married. But now that it’s also my debt, I realize how stupid that was. Besides his car being more expensive than mine to begin with, we’re throwing a lot of money on interest. But I will not talk about this further, since thinking about this will also upset me more.
Another dumb financial mistake is a one we made together as an engaged couple. We took a $20,500.00 loan against my now husband’s 401k. I can feel people shaking their heads and giving me dirty looks with pointy fingers, but what’s done is done and I am really sorry we did that. We took this loan out to help pay for our wedding and our honeymoon. Our families couldn’t help with our wedding, so we used all our savings, which wasn’t much, and then took out a loan and spent it all. I regret it now, but like I said, what’s done is done. I just need to pay this off and never ever do it again. Last time I checked, we still had about $12,000.00 left to pay. Ouch!!
I think that’s it for our debt. We don’t have any credit card debt since we pay it off every month. And starting in January, we decided not to use it unless we’re buying big items or for emergency use.
Let’s go into our savings. We currently have about $2,600.00 in our savings account. It’s not much, but it’s something and we’re going to continue to grow it. I have about $15,500.00 in 401k. My husband has about $40,000.00 in 401k and this is after the loan. The money that he’s actually getting some return on. I have about $9,000.00 in a traditional IRA account in a bank not earning much interest. I haven’t touched that account in a long time. I should make some contribution to this, but let’s take step by step and not try to do everything right at once. We have about $900.00 in an installment savings account that we make monthly deposit into. This was just started at the end of October 2012. Interest isn’t much, but my primary focus was to put money aside for savings. So that’s happening and it is giving me motivation to continue to stay focus on my financial goal.
Voila~ I said it. I layed it all out there. Whoever is reading this, please please~ don’t judge me. I’m trying to improve and whatever complaints and rants I’ll have in the future, it’s not because I’m a whiny or a spoiled person, but because we all need to get the frustration out of our system sometimes and need support to get back on the right track again.
Michelle's Finance Journal 