December 2018 Financial Progress Report -

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Welcome to our monthly Financial Progress report series. We started recording the progress of our journey to Financial Freedom in February 2018. Our Financial Progress report has allowed us to document our journey and hold ourselves more accountable. We are amazed to see the progress that can be made by finding different ways to decrease our debt, make more money and save more.

Each month after we have received all our financial statements and updated all our financial data, we then compose our financial progress report for the previous month.

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

We have 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 have become more prominent as we have excelled at utilizing our new category system. A couple months ago we shared our new budget category system with our readers. This will always be included 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. Currently, we are 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 back in our June Report we are continuing to use manual methods that aid in tracking our budget and spending. Each month we use the art of list making. There are two different prominent lists 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

November Total Debt: $126,908.02

December Total Debt: $126,916.97

Credit Card Debt: $17,170.65

Car Loan: $0.00

Student Loans: $109,746.32

Heading into December, we knew that we would see slower progress in our debt free journey. In fact we took a step backwards in adding a total $8.95 more to debt. This is hard to see but super thankful that it is not more. This is definitely due to us accidently ordering Amazon prime and it charged the wrong account. While we made a payment to cover the charged amount, we still ended up accruing interest and a higher debt protection fee.

As we mentioned is the last couple financial progress reports, we expect to see our debt snowball progress to slow down. Much of this has to do with my SO’s Income decreasing and not having enough to invest in side hustles to make up the difference. In addition, we are also approaching credit cards with balances over $1,000. With these high balances, we anticipate that it is going to take longer to pay off as our debt snowball payment is still below half that amount. Even with these odds against us, our hope still remains to diligently work on increasing our income and finding ways to cut expenses to help speed up this debt repayment process.

Savings

November Total Savings: $6096.22

December Total Savings: $6494.53

Emergency Fund: $3,756.07

Christmas Sinking Fund: $500.00

C’s Retirement Fund: $2,238.46

Back in October we set up our first ever Christmas Sinking Fund. We were super excited about this accomplishment as this will be the first time in our relationship that we had the ability to cash flow Christmas. In previous years we have relied heavily on credit cards to fund Secret Santa gifts, Holiday Party Dishes, Santa Gifts and much more. This year we had set aside $100 for each person in our household. Additionally, we had budgeted an additional $100 to use for work and family secret Santa activities and holiday dishes to pass. Were you able to cash flow Christmas this year?

If being able to cash flow Christmas wasn’t exciting enough, we ended up not even having to use our sinking fund to fund Christmas this year. We ended up spending about $200 less than what we had originally budgeted for. Since we had a third paycheck in November and started December off with a surplus, we were able to utilize that to cash flow Christmas completely. We feel really accomplished that we managed to not utilize our sinking fund, cash flow Christmas as a monthly expense and maintain all our other bills and expenses.

Overall, we had a decent amount of growth in our savings due to my retirement contributions and not having to deplete our Christmas sinking fund. Our next decision is what to do with the Christmas sinking fund. We have many options such as using it towards debt, keeping it in savings or adding it to a new sinking fund for either a vacation, new car, or a down payment on a new home.

We are excited about the possibilities that arise as our savings accounts continue to grow.

Expenses

Total Expenses: Largest Spending Categories

Food: 24%

Housing and Utilities: 17%

Debt: 15%

SO’s Lifestyle: 9%

December happened to be another month that seen quite the shift in largest spending categories. Last month we started reporting our housing and utility expenses together and while the percentage increased slightly, this category still remains as our second largest category. Our food category increased in spending to be our largest spending category this month. Due to our decrease in our debt snowball our debt category ending up being our third largest expense. Our fourth largest expense still remains to be my SO’s lifestyle category which consists of his own spending money and his hobbies which happens to be fishing!

Our Food category has consistently been a struggle this year to keep low. Most of this is due to the lack of planning or straying from the plan. Also, we started adding our daughter’s formula and baby food to our grocery budget amount. This was previously reported in one of our Kid’s expense categories.

As we move forward into January, we are aiming to spend under 20% in our food category. In addition, we would like to look at a way to make tracking our spending a bit more automatic and simpler. The time to sit and focus on tracking every receipt and expense written in the checkbook manually is proving to be more difficult. What do you currently use to track your expenses?

Income

November Total Extra Income: $358.19

December Total Extra Income: $22.29

We happened to see a drastic decrease in Total Extra Income for December. I am mainly the one who manages the Household finances and work to bring in extra income through side hustles. Due to my organization beginning its busy season in December, much of my extra time was devoted to my day job and then my home life. Therefore, I did not manage to make additional time to pursue additional income opportunities. Nonetheless, we still made some extra income in December. Much of this extra income was attributed to Ibotta.

My earnings through Ibotta decreased slightly in December. Mainly this was due to us buying things outside of coupons or rebates being available. However, this does not take away the fact that Ibotta has been our highest earner for extra income! Ibotta has been a great way for our family to receive cash back on our everyday grocery shopping. We have already earned over $200 since we started using Ibotta last year. Are you interested in learning how you can maximize your Ibotta’s earning potential? If you decide to start taking advantage of cash back through Ibotta, we invite you to join our team here. By joining our team and redeeming one offer within the first month, you will earn $10.00!

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Ibotta: $12.80

Mystery Shopping: $0.00

User testing: $0.00

Online Surveys: $1.10

Misc: $8.39

Monthly Goals

Back 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. In August, we began highlighting our monthly 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 that we completed 100% and red cross marks on those we did not complete below 99%.

In December, we failed to complete three out of the five goals we had originally set out to achieve for the month. We changed the focus of our goals slightly in December, with the thoughts of the new year on the horizon. While we were not able to contribute to our savings with additional money from our paychecks, we did manage to not utilize our Christmas sinking fund. In a way, this was like contributing to our savings as the money stayed in our savings earning interest. We are excited that we managed to finally payoff D’s Citi Credit Card which was such a great relief. Even though we didn’t accomplish the goals that we set out to meet in December, we did make some progress. We look forward to starting a New Year and adding more clarity to our overall life goals.

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 January!

Recap

December happened to be a good month for us despite the lack of being able to contribute tremendously to our financial freedom journey. We accomplished the ability to cash flow Christmas without even using our sinking fund and earn extra income. We contribute much of this success to our diligence in planning ahead in the previous months. While we are still learning the art of budgeting, we are still managing to move forward in the right direction.

Previous Financial Progress Reports:

Overall, we still achieved some progress towards Financial Freedom in December. Even with this small progress we still are amazed at the support we have gained from the debt-free community and having these reports for accountability. This has really allowed us to remain determined and confident in our abilities to keep meeting goals. January will continue to be a month of surprises as we navigate changes in our income and how that will impact our budget into the New Year. Altogether, we look forward to our continued progress towards Financial Freedom.

How was your progress towards financial freedom in December? Did Christmas break your budget this year? Comment below to share your responses. We are a judge-free zone!