Hello everyone and welcome to 2018! I hope this year is even better than the last for you and the people you love. Whether you’re a believer in New Year’s Resolutions or not, there’s one thing Seth and I will definitely be starting anew this year, and that’s our three budgeting spreadsheets. I know three budgeting spreadsheets sounds excessive, but as I refresh you on these three spreadsheets (if you’ve stuck with me on the blog this year, you’ve already seen all three), I’ll share with you why I think each one is necessary for us, and I’ll share a link with you to a new and updated template for each spreadsheet for the year!
First: The General Budget
We first introduced you to our comprehensive budget spreadsheet in this post.
This is the one where we track our daily expenses, and I mean EVERYTHING. I know that sounds super tedious, but it has really helped me see where I’m spending money on frivolous things that aren’t getting me any closer to our long-term goals. I say “me” because Seth has really always been a saver, so he doesn’t do much frivolous spending anyway. But the first three months of using our budget spreadsheet, we paid 16.9%, 6.5%, and 9.6% of our total budget toward our student loans. Meanwhile, our largest spending categories those three months were 43.1% (Renovations – understandable since this was November 2016 and the month we began renovating), 24.3% (Yearly Expenses – This includes our car insurance, but also a monstrous amount of unnecessary holiday spending), and 27.3% (Everything Else – What the hell did we spend over a quarter of the budget on?!?!). It didn’t feel like I was spending a lot of money on unnecessary items, but when the evidence was sitting in front of me, it was hard to ignore. The very next month, our largest spending category was student loans (31.9%), and it has remained our largest spending category all year, peaking at 47.2% of our budget in September. It made up 30.7% of our budget for the entire YEAR. That is the kind of progress I want to be making when it comes to chipping away at our student debt.
Second: The Student Loan Payment Competition
We introduced you to our little student loan competition early in 2017 in this post. I won, for 2017, by the way. I paid off 52% (yes, you read that correctly FIFTY TWO PERCENT!) of my loans this year, which is HUGE since I have the far larger share of student loans in this marriage. This spreadsheet was great because it plays into my competitive nature. Early in the year, it was a close race, and it was satisfying to look at the percentages before and after I made a payment and see myself pulling ahead (it takes 3x more money for me to keep up with Seth since I essentially had 3x the loan debt). Later in the year, when I started really pulling far ahead, it didn’t get any less satisfying. Yes I am the jerk who doesn’t just want to win, I want to CRUSH the competition. And it worked in my favor for once, so just let me have this please. I will say that Seth paid off an extremely respectable 20.6% of his loans this year, which is still far more than you’d pay off just paying the minimum, and I’m really proud of our progress. We intend to reinstate this for 2018, and I’ll let you know when I choose my prize for this year’s win. I’d also like to point out that this awesome feat was only possible because I was able to curb my spending by looking at our monthly budget and identifying ways I could cut spending in other areas (like fast food, or buying clothes, or eating out).
Student Loan Payment Competition
Third: New Worth Tracking
We introduced the idea of tracking our net worth in a spreadsheet in this post. We’ve officially completed an entire year of tracking our net worth, and I’m pleased to say that we went from having a negative net worth (our debts outweighed our assets) to a positive net worth in ONE YEAR! That’s a big deal since we were tens of thousands of dollars in the hole at the start of the year. A big part of that is because we figured out a way to spend way more money paying off our student loans. But our net worth increased by $58,900 in one year. That’s not ALL from paying down student debt. It’s also from making regular monthly payments on our house, cars, etc. It’s from making smart spending choices that keep us out of credit card debt. And it’s from adding value to our house by making smart renovations for a smart price tag. That is really the beauty of this spreadsheet. It takes all of the mundane things you feel like you have to do every month (like pay the mortgage) and quantifies how much progress that mundane thing is helping you make. For example, our mortgage payment knocks about $340 dollars off of our principle balance each month. That means it increases our net worth by $340 per month, or $4080 per year. It doesn’t feel much like progress when you make that payment, but it sure looks like progress on the spreadsheet!
So those are the three spreadsheets that helped us take control of our finances in 2017 and will continue to help us move toward our financial goals in 2018. I shared a template for each spreadsheet so you can join us in our journey toward financial freedom if your goals for 2018 include financial ones. Don’t forget to make a copy of the template and save it to your own Google Drive! Otherwise you’re saving your budget in our drive (oops!), and feel free to share your likes and dislikes with us, or suggestions for improvement as the year progresses. Health, happiness, and love to you all this year!
