August Update: $10,000 Debt Repayment Update

August 17, 2016

CleverDude_DebtPic

In June I announced my mission to pay off $9,888.00 in debt by the end of the year. I’ll be utilizing every means necessary to do it, including:

Reducing weekly spending
Re-starting my mystery shopping side hustle
Pick up extra writing jobs
Temporarily halt deposits into our emergency fund / savings

It’s time for an update, this is month #2 of our journey. Let’s take a look at the breakdown of how we did this month!

Minimum Monthly Payment

The minimum monthly payment for the current billing cycle was $147. The minimum payment was already factored into our monthly budget therefore no reduction in spending or extra income needed to cover this.

Suspension Of Saving

Until the debt is gone, we’re suspending our monthly contributions to our emergency fund / savings. This gives us an additional $500 to put towards the debt.

Reduction of Spending

We reduced our weekly entertainment spending by $60 per week, adding $240 to our debt repayment effort. This is down significantly from last month because we had to come up with extra cash for a visit to the vet for our cat. We spent $320 to find out our cat was dehydrated. Dear cat, please drink more water.

Mystery Shopping

I still didn’t do any mystery shopping, but it’s because I ignored it on purpose. More info in the section on extra writing!

Extra Writing

I got paid for the extra writing opportunity from last month, which added $50 to our debt repayment total. Plus, I was presented with four additional opportunities which total $650! That money will be paid out in the next 30 days.

Our debt payment this month breaks down as follows:

Minimum payment : $147
Suspension of Saving: $500
Reduction of Spending: $240
Extra Writing Payment: $50

Total payment: $937

A great reduction of our debt, but still well below the $1648 per month needed. However, next month should be much better. Hopefully no visit to the vet will be needed, and I’ll have some big time extra funds from writing to apply to the debt.