End of Month 1 Progress Report

Well it has been a chaotic month around here for us. Moving has caused a bit of a disruption in our normal spending and shopping habits, which has made an impact on our previously planned budget, despite efforts on my part to avoid it. So, here is where we currently sit:

On our first loan we have made more progress than anticipated. I made the regular $25 payment on the first of June, followed by our $100 bonus payment for the month. This bonus payment counted for July's payment and made it so that the next payment wouldn't be due until August first. Well, out of habit, I went ahead and made another $25 payment yesterday in preparation for the regular July 1st payment. The end result is that we don't have an actual payment due again until September first now, and the $25 payment from this week was applied just like a bonus payment!

Of course, I have every intention of continuing to make the regular $25 payment at the beginning of every single month, as well as the $100 bonus payment, so it is looking like this loan may go down even faster than I thought! It is amazing the difference I am already seeing in the amount of the payment that is applied to interest every single time. Before, $9 out of every $25 was being applied to interest. Now we are closer to $4-5. Part of this is caused by the lower principal amount, but some of it is also caused by making 2 payments in a month so that the interest for the month is split between them. Even if it doesn't make a huge difference in the actual amount of interest being paid overall, it is still giving me a positive boost just because I can see that a larger percentage of every payment is being applied to the principal.

Naturally, all of the other regular payments were made on our loans for July 1st as well (except for AES because it is due in the second half of the month). I have not totaled the amount of change overall yet, but I am assuming it is close to the .4% difference seen after the 1st of June, so I am probably safe to say that we are barely approaching the 1% mark at this point for overall debt paid off going into July. It is a seemingly small number, but to think, as we get each loan paid off and snowball these payments together we will begin paying off chunks of our loans 5 and 10 percent at a time near the end! I can't wait!!!

The one downfall this month with moving was that I did not budget NEARLY enough money for gas as I should have. Typically $50 in gas will get me through at least 1 week, but since we have been making three or four trips a day back and forth to the apartment and having to put gas in the moving truck things got out of control quickly. I ended up having to pull $100 out of savings (OUCH!) to cover the cost of fuel for all those trips. So even though I hit my monthly target of $350 in savings, I definitely took a big step back on this one, and I will have to make up for it in the very near future. The good news is that I used Jason's paycheck to pay the first half of July's bills, but I still have a paycheck coming in this Friday which technically still counts as June, so I may be able to squeeze $100 out of this check to put back into savings and be on time for my goal.  It's not a perfect solution but it's better than falling behind!

So let's look forward to another month of making progress, making our goals and hopefully not having any more reasons to take money out of savings!!!!

For those of you who are playing along with me and have set goals, how much progress did you make at the end of this month?