August 2018 Financial Progress Report -

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We have successfully been completing Personal Financial Progress Report for the last six months! When we became more serious about our journey to Financial Freedom in February 2018 we decided to use personal financial progress reports as a way to document our journey and to hold us more accountable. It has been interesting to see our progress each month as we find different ways to decrease our debt, make more money and save more.

Here we are in September already! Now that we have received all our statements, we can now take a look back on August and see how much progress we made towards our financial goals.

In our Financial Progress reports, you can expect to see an outline of our debt, savings, expenses, and income. Also, we will include a small snippet of what we did or what we need to do to improve each area. As time goes on, you can expect these progress reports to evolve and improve as we learn more about taking control and cultivating our money.

Budget Update

In August, we continued to use Dave Ramsey’s Everydollar website as our main budgeting tool. We have continued to use the categories that were broken down back in April. The trends in our spending habits are becoming more prominent as we continue to use this new category system. Last month, we shared our new budget category system with our readers. We will include them in each Financial Progress Report moving forward. Let us know how you have your budget categories set up!

Recently, we have been discussing changing the way we view our budget. We are considering fine-tuning our budget to mimic either the budget category percentages suggested by Dave Ramsey or through the 50/30/20 rule. We are currently learning more about these budget types and deciding which seems most feasible for our life at the moment. We would love to hear feedback from anyone who uses these budgeting techniques or others!

As we mentioned in our June Report we continuing to use manual methods that aid in tracking our budget and spending. Each month we use the art of list making. There two most prominent list that we use. One list is composed of all our bills with due dates and the second list breaks down our bills and their due dates by the week. This allows us to stay on track with our bills being paid on time and making sure that we use the correct paycheck for each billing period. These are just extra steps we take to provide checks and balances and give us peace of mind.

Now that we have provided you with an update on our budget, let’s take a look at our progress!

Debt

July Total Debt: $128,288.54

August Total Debt: $127,925.52

Credit Card Debt: $18,179.20

Car Loan: $0.00

Student Loans: $109,746.32

August was our first month in the last 4 years where we started and ended the month without a car loan. We are ecstatic that we can now distribute that money towards our credit card debt. We continued to use the debt snowball method this month. A portion of the money I earned through extra income and our previous car loan payment went towards our smallest credit card balance. We were able to officially payoff my SO’s Meijer credit card!

The next couple of months we may see faster progress with debt payoffs as we are still tackling credit card debts that are under $1,000. Once we get to the debts that over $1,000, we will start seeing payoff’s further apart. However, the hope is that we will keep increasing our income and finding different ways to save money to speed up this process.

By the end of August, we were able to pay off a total of $363.02 in debt. This amount is larger than the two previous months debt payments. This difference is contributed to the fact that I returned back to work and received one week’s worth of pay before the end of the month. We made decent progress this month and look forward to making more as we become a two-income household again.

Savings

July Total Savings: $5,595.08

August Total Savings: $4042.21

Emergency Fund: $2153.08

Maternity Leave: $900

C’s Retirement Fund: $989.13

In the month of August, our savings did not exactly go according to plan. As you may see our maternity leave fund had to decrease during the month of August. Even with the decrease, we still ended the month with a surplus in the maternity leave sinking fund. Overall, our savings increased slightly this month. However, we didn’t deplete our maternity leave fund as planned which gives us a small win.

Now that I have returned to work, we will be moving the surplus from our maternity leave fund back into our emergency fund for now. We spent the month of August discussing the different sinking funds that we would like to focus on and you will hear more about that in our September progress report. While we lacked contribution to our savings in August, we still feel like we came ahead and are better off now than we were a year ago. It really helps to look at the small wins when you are a long journey to financial freedom!

Expenses

Total Expenses: Largest Spending Categories

Debt: 26%

Food: 21%

Utilities: 9%

Housing: 7%

Our Debt continues to be our largest spending category, however, we are starting to see this percentage decrease slowly each month. Our food budget still continues to be an area that we need to work on. We are hoping that with me returning back to work and our daughter back to getting free school lunch, we will see this category decrease by a few percents in September.

In August, we also saw a slight decrease in our utilities and housing cost. During the summer months our gas bill decreases to below $15.00 a month, but typically our electric goes up as we start using the central air. This past month, we tried having the windows open more and using fans to cool the house down. This proved to help slightly with our monthly bill. We are hoping that with all of us gone during the day in September, that we will see a dramatic decrease in our electric bill. Stay tuned for our next financial progress report to find out!

Income

July Total Extra Income: $249.59

August Total Extra Income: $71.08

We were not as dedicated to working towards extra income in August. This is evident in how much of a decrease you see. After returning to work full time it has been difficult finding the extra time to commit to our side hustles. Now I had to adjust back to my old schedule but now with two daughters in tow. Most of our extra earnings came from a surprise check from a lawsuit settlement and savings from using Ibotta.

My earnings through Ibotta increased in August as I was able to take advantage of different bonuses! Ibotta has been a great way for our family to receive cash back on our everyday grocery shopping. We have already earned over a $130 since we started using Ibotta a few months ago. Are you interested in learning how you can maximize your Ibotta’s earning potential? If you are interested in starting to take advantage of cash back through Ibotta, we invite you to join our team here. By joining our team and redeeming one offer you will earn $10.00 within your first month!

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Ibotta: $27.34

Mystery Shopping: $5.00

User testing: $0.00

Online Surveys: $0.93

Misc: $37.81

Monthly Goals

In July, we started sharing our monthly goals. This was done to create a visual of our goals as well as to hold ourselves accountable. We try to aim for at least 5 different goals that range within financial, personal, physical and life goals. Currently, we have been posting these goals to our Instagram. Starting this month, we will begin highlighting the goals and their end results in each financial progress report.

We decided to do this because many of the goals are small actionable goals that are contributing to our bigger goals of financial freedom. In our monthly goal visual, you will find a green checkmark on those we completed 100% and red cross marks on those we did not complete below 99%.

In August, we successfully completed two out of the five goals we set out to achieve for the month. However, two of the three that were not completed were started and achieved about 75% of completion before the end of the month. We published 3 new blog posts in August instead of 4 and I completed 3/4 of my book. Even with this remarkable progress, I wanted to only add checkmarks to those goals that were achieved 100%.

We have really enjoyed using this process to commit to monthly goals. It aids in keeping us on track and allows us to break down those big dreams into smaller achievable ones. We look forward to continuing to do this each month. Check out our Instagram feed if you’re interested to see where our focus is going in September!

Recap

August proved to us that we can still make progress even during temporary changes like a maternity leave. We contribute the progress to us planning ahead and preparing for the loss of income, while simultaneously working on ways to increase income and reduce expenses. We ended the month with a surplus in our debt repayment attempts as well as our attempts to make extra income. While we were not able to originally contribute to savings, we did have a surplus in our maternity leave sinking fund. This made us feel like our savings progress is in surplus as well.

Previous Financial Progress Reports:

Overall, our progress towards Financial Freedom in August is fairly positive and will continue to grow as we go back to being a two-income household again. With the support from the debt-free community and having these reports for accountability, we have remained determined and confident in our abilities to keep meeting goals. We continue to expect to see our progress gain momentum in September. We look forward to our continued progress towards Financial Freedom.

Did you make any progress towards financial freedom in August? Do you set monthly or weekly goals that help you reach your bigger financial freedom goals? Comment below to share more about your progress or your strategy behind goal setting.