Aggressive goals and negative self-talk, but I’m on track!

It has been 6 months since I posted! Wow, time flies! This definitely means that it is time for an update.

So things have been going along as can be expected, I have been continuing the aggressive-sized transfers to my student loan, and there have been some setbacks, which I basically expected. I wasn’t sure if I could sustain this aggressive level of debt repayment because it leaves me with very little of my paycheck to actually live on, and what I found was that it was very difficult, as expected. I ended up having to reduce or even cancel some of the extra payments to keep up with other parts of my life, and I felt pretty horrible about myself for this. The negative self-talk was strong at times. I semi-continually felt like a failure for not being able to keep up with the lofty (and probably unrealistic) goals that I had set for myself, even though I know better! I know all about setting goals that are realistic and attainable, and I fully understand the negative effect that not doing so can have on our thoughts about ourselves, yet somehow I still fell victim to this pattern. I set out with the goal of putting 61% of my after tax income toward my student loan, which means that I had 39% of my after-tax income remaining to live on. That includes housing, groceries, gas, phone bill, spending money, everything. So it makes complete sense that this was really hard. I ended up making some adjustments including deciding to transfer some of my savings which were earning a low ROI to the student loan, where I knew I had a guaranteed 7% return on my money. Overall, when all was said and done, I have actually made a lot of progress. Looking at the numbers really put things into perspective and gave me a good reality check for the negative self-talk. I may have felt like a financial failure over the course of the last 6 months, but I have actually made a lot of progress! So let’s look at the numbers…

My overall net worth is now at -13,426.64, and at my last post it was at -22,208.77$. Everything is moving in the right direction. If you have read my previous posts, then you may know that I have one student loan at a low interest rate which was originally about 11 grand, and my main student loan which started out at about 50,000. I also had credit card debt at the start of this journey but that was the first thing I dealt with.

My overall net worth in my last post was -22,208.77$, and it is now at –13,623.64$. This means I have increased it by 8585.13 since then. My main student loan (that I was aiming to pay down by 1 year from my last post) is currently sitting at -9942.50$, and in my last post 6 months ago, I said that it was at -25,882$. This means I have somehow paid off 15,939.50$ on it in 6 months! Because some of this was a transfer from existing savings, unfortunately this large jump doesn’t also reflect in my overall net worth. This also means that I am currently on track to finish paying it off by next summer! According to my calculations just now, I should be done paying it down (IF things go according to plan) in 5.37 months. That would put me roughly into April 2020, which is 1 year from that last post. I can’t currently fully believe that this could actually happen; it seems like a magical dream. There will likely be more setbacks, so we will see what the timeline actually ends up looking like, but overall, the progress has me feeling super excited!