Did you participate in Black Friday / Cyber Monday or did you participate in Buy Nothing Day?
I bought one thing on Black Friday. I had no business buying anything else given my finances right now. Read More
A few financial headlines caught my attention this week. Some good, others… not so much. So here they are; the good, the bad, the ugly, and the WTF?.
It’s finally official that 401(k) employee contribution limits will rise to $19,000 in 2019. (Source: IRS)
If you are someone fortunate enough to have access to a 401(k), let alone be able to max it out, enjoy the extra $500 next year. Don’t forget to adjust your withholding settings in January.
Not to be left behind, IRAs and Roth IRAs contribution limit will increase from $5,500/year to $6,000/year. (Source: IRS)
People who max this tax advantaged space every year (I hope to be one next year), are excited about making round, even $500 monthly (or $250 semi-monthly) payments instead of the odd $458.33 monthly (or $229.16 semi-monthly) payments. Yeah, this is actually a thing that people geek out on. Read More
My debt is still big, but it’s not crushing me anymore!
Good news! I was able to re-refinance my loan with my current student loan company to get a lower rate. Everything went through as of yesterday and I am now the proud owner of a shiny new student loan. I don’t know if this is a common thing for student loan companies to allow or not, but I’m just glad I didn’t have to move over to a new servicer. Woot! Read More
I’d been using a certain website to track my accounts to get an aggregate view of most of my balances, but it recently shut down. 😦 However, I found another site and it’s great, much better even. 🙂 I can now track all of my accounts (spending and saving) in one place, and have everything automatically updated. Definitely an upgrade.
Using this new tool and looking at my accounts made me start thinking about ways to make improvements. 💡 So I took action. Read More
At last!!
At long last, I have reached the 50’s! Can you believe I’ve been in the 60’s since July of last year!?!
It really doesn’t take long to notice how much reducing my monthly payments impacts my timeline.
Original Balance: $112,258
Remaining Balance: $58,600
Monthly Payments: ~$1,720.00 (down from $2,720) 😦
Term Remaining on Debtor’s Prison Sentence: 3 years and 1 month 😦
Current (variable) Interest rate: 4.55% (up from original rate of 3.42%)
