Friday, September 1st, 2006
September Progress Report
Last month, when I put up information about my finances, both the purpose and the method seemed to confuse people, so I've come up with a solution that's much clearer to me and hopefully will be much clearer to you. As far as the purpose goes, one of the biggest things in my life at the moment is becoming debt free and saving and investing as much money as possible before the first of next year. Putting up progress reports helps me keep my eye on the prize.
I make a certain amount of money every month, which is my yearly income divided into twelve equal parts. This number is 100% of my monthly income, a number we'll call X and for simplicy's sake, we'll say X is equal to $10,000.
Right off the top, 29.9% ($2,990) of that money is taken away and given to federal, state, and local governments, leaving me 70.1%, or $7010.
This month, my regularly scheduled bills, including rent, cell phone, NetFlix, and my scheduled payments toward debt totaled 51% of X, or $5100, but I paid 78.5% of X which was mostly made up of accellerated debt payments. I paid 40.6% percent of X in the past month towards my debt. These numbers add up to way more than 100% of my monthly income for this month, but most of that is due to paying back interest bearing debt with new and old lines of credit that don't have any interest, which is good work if you can get it.
My debt now stands at 96.7% of X, or $9,670, based on my imaginary $10,000 a month scale, which isn't a whole lot, but then neither is my gross worth as of right now, which is 335% of X, or $33,500. Last month though, based on my crude calculations, my debt was 132% of X and my worth was 285% of X, so that means my debt has been reduced by $3500 and my worth increased by about $5000, again based on the $10,000 a month scale. Not too shabby!
As far as my personal things go, I've continued to write in my journal, which becomes very easy to forget when I feel good, and I've continued working towards my list goals, most of which recently involved going to school, though I haven't been terribly enthusiastic about that and in fact, I'll not be attending school this semester. I did make quite a bit of progress on that front which has inspired me to actually go see someone to figure out where I need to go and what I need to take, and perhaps I'll attend the Spring '07 semester. We'll see.