Success Warrior: Alan B. Rowley II - Beachbody.com, P90X, Voluntaryism, Voluntarism

August's Percentages

You can see the obvious correlation again between spending on stuff and our ability to pay down our debt.  I printed out a full size page with this graph on it and I'm going to hang it where I can see it each day.  It really is a great reminder.

That's why I am sharing it with you.  I hope that it helps remind you as well. 

We are going to try and nudge the savings up closer to 10%.  Doing that means that we will have to take the money from somewhere else.  We reached our short term goal with our savings this month.  The next step we want is 2 1/2 times more money so we are thinking about putting more in each month.

We used the van to go to town this time and it shows in the increase to Transportation. 

We think that we will have the van paid off before our heating bill goes back through the roof.  Maybe it won't be as cold this year.  If we can pay off the van before the electricity bill goes way up, we'll be able to use some (most) of the money that was a van payment for that bill and be able to focus on the paying off the car. 

Sounds like a good plan anyway.  =)

I was wondering as I was driving

There is a huge overpass being built in Farmington Utah.  It has been under construction for 3 or 4 years.  This seems like a long time to me.  I'm not really sure what it's being built for unless it's part of the new highway (Legacy) they are building.

As we drove through the mess (not the picture but something that has quite a few more overpasses than this), I was wondering about peak oil.

On one side of the coin, I hear that we are running out of oil and that prices are going to be going up and up shortly.  Eventually this will reduce the number of cars on the road.

Oil prices have dropped from their all time high for now but our refineries have dropped how much they are putting out and OPEC has dropped how much they are shipping out (but are adamant that it has nothing to do with running out of oil).  Gas prices have been artificially reduced to try to head off the recession that the subprime lending fiasco has put us on a collision course with.

On the other side of the coin are things like this new spaghetti bowl being built and a new highway that will run from north northern utah to Salt Lake City (which is considered Norther Utah).  The highway is being built because there is only one road that leads from the north to Salt Lake City.  More and more people are moving out of Salt Lake City and commute to work.  The Legacy Highway will help alleviate the traffic mess that has occurred because of the mass commute.

My questions as we drove under all the unfinished overpasses were these:  Will this thing be done before gas prices go up to the point where traffic is reduced?  Should we be using the money on mass transit instead of a new road? 

With the truth being hidden, I suppose that I will have to wait and see what happens in the next couple of years to get my answers.

Hey, we met with a new real estate agent yesterday.  I'll have to tell you about that tomorrow.

Weekly Meeting: Bouncing Off the Mirror

This is a beautiful picture of the correlation between spending money on debt vs. spending money on debt and also shows wonderfully what awareness can do.

I showed this chart to my wife this morning.  Again, it's something that she (and all of you) already knows but to have it stare at you like this just makes it hit home.  At least it did for me and it did for her this morning. 

The more you can cut down on all the stuff, the more money you can put toward your debt pay off plan.  I'm not saying that it's unnecessary stuff.  Some of it is and some of it isn't.

Weekly Meeting: Adding in the Other 401k

I'm able to access my wife's 401k information online now so I added that to our money numbers.  That brought us back down below where we were before we bought the car. 

We wrote out a check last week for the van but never sent it so we will send it this week when we send out this week's payment.  We get paid weekly so we are able to send in money every week on the debt that we are trying to pay off.  It's nice and ends up saving us a little bit of money.

Interest is calculated off the total amount of principle owing so the more often you can reduce the principle, the less interest you end up paying.  It might only be pennies on a car payment but it could really add up on a house payment.  It could also add up on something with a high percentage rate.  Not everyone has this option, I know, but if you do, I highly recommend that you send the money in weekly to the debt that you are trying to pay off.

Maybe you and your spouse get paid every two weeks.  If it's alternating weeks, that would be nice.  If not, just send your extra payments in every two weeks.  Don't save up for one big payment each month.  Send whatever extra money you have whenever you have it.  This will pay down the debt faster and keep you from dipping into the money for other things. 

The Money Has To Come From Somewhere

My wife and I keep track of our spending and I have all our spending broken down in categories.  We write down all the money that we spend on Debts, Savings (including 401k), House, Transportation, and the broad Other category.  I suggest to my clients to set up their tracking system in a similar manner and all my current clients have taken my advice. 

Everyone who is trying to change their financial situation should be tracking where they spend their money.  Every single penny.  Awareness is the first step.

That's what the purpose of this blog has become.  It's still a personal journal of my attempt to reach the goal of being debt free but all the information that I post on mortgages, credit cards, and everything else is done in the hopes that readers will become more aware of the games being played to take away their money.  I learn stuff all the time because I was never taught any of this stuff.  I figure that if I wasn't, there are probably a lot of people out there in the same boat.

One of the key points of tracking your money in the fashion I describe is that you can see a very obvious either/or relationship between Debts and Other.  I keep track of the percentages and then I graph them out.  Even though I haven't told you that I graph them, you probably knew, right?  It's a sickness.

Anyway, how obvious is the relationship between Debt and Other?

June's Numbers - So Much Work Undone

This shows what I consider to be more important than my net worth.  This shows how much debt I'm carrying versus how much money assets I have. 

Our progress was looking so good and then, Bam!  We bought a car.  Now we have to get to work again trying to bring it all back down.  We are hoping to have it back down to where it was in about 8 weeks.  We don't know if that's actually possible but we are going to try.

I do like that we have a positive net worth because I think I have probably had a negative net worth since getting my first credit card decades ago.  I would like it more though if I could get this chart down to zero. 

I always look forward to the first financial meeting of the month

I really do.  I get excited when it draws close.  What will the numbers show this time?  How much progress did we make in the month?  Can we do better next month?  I track our numbers on a spreadsheet and use networthIQ to see what's happening.

You can see the sharp decline at the end of last month and how sharp the decline was this last week.  The reason that it tends to dip sharper at the end of the month is because that's when we pay the car and house payments.  We pay Sallie Mae every week because it's like pouring salt on a leech.  The more the better to see we can stop her from sucking money from our life.

We have just about killed off the Sallie Mae bill and when the leech has been pulled from our banking account, we'll turn our attention to the car payment. 

There is no animosity toward the car payment other than somehow we ended up paying loan insurance for a while.  I believe we did that as a barter to get half the interest rate that we would have gotten if we had used the bank the car dealership steered us toward.  There's a definite lesson there.

Back To The Numbers For The Month of May

I track our finances in several ways.  I like to look at it from different angles.  I like to look for trends and patterns.  I like to compare from week to week and month to month.  The cool thing for my clients is that I do many of the same things for them just because I find it interesting.  A little added bonus just because I find it fascinating.

One thing I have been doing is tracking where our money goes by percentage.  The numbers only go back to March of this year because I changed the items in the categories based on how I describe things in my book.

Spending on debt went down this month as planned because we knew that spending in the car and misc. category was going to go up.  We spent more on fuel this month, both because of higher gas prices and because of more travel.  That's a bad combination and maybe we'll have to move Trey's birthday to April to avoid summer gas prices.  It's a thought.  We also had to pay the taxes on the car.

The miscellaneous category took a sharp upswing because of Trey's birthday.  We spent money on presents, on the trip to the zoo, and a bit more on groceries than normal.

We spent more on house maintenance too but the electricity bill is the biggest factor in that category.  As the cold weather leaves, that category goes down.  It will rise again in the winter. In January, the electricity bill dwarfs all other bills.  We have to enjoy the extra money in the warm weather.

Savings continues to chug along at an even 5%.  We want to raise that to 10% in the future but debts come first. 

This month will probably see another rise in miscellaneous and drop in debt.  We are going to pay off Sallie Mae and then use our money for things we have been putting off for quite a while.  We'll get back into it in July.

Any way that it goes, it will be progress and it will be interesting to me.   

May Went Pretty Much As Planned - Numbers

We always hope for more but this month just didn't go that way.  It doesn't hurt to hope but it went pretty much the way we thought it would.  Fixing up the yard, paying the taxes on the car, and Trey's birthday took some money away from our debt paying.

One thing that we have to take time to realize is that we do everything with cash so we really can't complain too much, especially when we paid off 61% of the student loan.  We are getting so close to having that dang thing paid off, we can taste it. 

In fact, we are going to have a bit of a celebratory dinner when it's paid off so we really can taste it.  I'm going to barbeque up some rib eyes and crab and we shall feast.  On cash, of course. 

Starting To Look At May's Numbers

The month is coming to an end and that means it's time to start looking back at how we did.  This month was full of out of the ordinary expenses.  They aren't actually out of the ordinary at all but more month specific.  We had to spend money for lawncare (and now my lawnmower isn't working), Trey's Birthday, and the taxes on our van (or registration fee as they call it).  As you can see, all are annual expenses that will come around each May.  Lawncare will vary from year to year but the other two are pretty much a given.

What that meant was that less money was put toward our debt.  You can see we had pretty good momentum going in April and then things start to flatten out in May.  I think that flatter trend may continue through June.  Next week will probably show a drop and then flatter for the rest of the month.

I miscalculated on my taxes and we owe the feds $1,000.  We'll pay that off in June.  There are a couple of other things other than debt that we will be spending money on in June and then in July we'll be back at it.

I know some people like to have extra taxes taken out so that they make sure they get a refund at the end of the year but I feel like I'm losing money if I do that.  I could either be using that money to pay down a debt that I'm paying interest on (saving me money) or I could put that money into a money market where I'm getting paid interest (making me money).  I try to cut it close and last year I failed to take one major item into consideration and I ended up owing.  It all works out.  We filed and told them we'd pay so they're happy.

We should have our Sallie Mae student loan paid off next week.  Huzzah!

Our devious plan to stop paying interest is coming together.  Muahahahahhaahaha!