July Update: $10,000 Debt Repayment Update

July 18, 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 the middle of the month, and as promised it’s time for my very first update. 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 $148. 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 $140 per week, adding $560 to our debt repayment effort.

Mystery Shopping

This was a big failure. I didn’t even look at the job boards for potential jobs to pick up some extra cash.

Extra Writing

I did pick up an extra writing job worth $50, but I won’t get paid for it until next month. This category as well as mystery shopping will always lag behind a month.

Our debt payment this month breaks down as follow:

Minimum payment : $148
Suspension of Saving: $500
Reduction of Spending: $560

Total payment: $1208

To achieve our goal, we would need to make 6 payments of $1648. We made a nice payment this month, but not good enough for the pace needed to pay off the debt completely by the end of the year. Our plan is to reduce spending even more this month, and do a better job of looking for extra income to add to our debt payment for next month.

How about you, Clever Friends, are you paying off a large amount of debt? How’s it going for you?

Brought to you courtesy of Brock