So I’m very late in posting this update, however the numbers are from early in the month. Not a whole lot of excitment in the past 30 days or so – still chipping away at that debt. My ‘year’ ends in October, so I’m going to pass the $10,000 mark in debt payoff within the past 12 months.

I’m looking forward to that number increasing in the next year as well – which would hopefully make it my last year in debt (besides upcoming student loans…gulp.)

A dive in stocks this past month didn’t bode well for my overall net worth, however I continued to put money towards my credit card debt and am close to getting that monster down to the $10k mark.

The good news this month is that my 401k rollover has finally taken place – the bad news is that, due to just missing the vesting period, about $4K of my previous 401k fund doesn’t get to make the trip to retirement with me. Oh well. It’s a marathon, not a sprint and I’m hopefully doing just fine considering where I am in life and debt.

So, in the past month, my net worth has shot up incredibly. This is largely due to a big lift in stock prices that has affected my 401k, brokerage account and my Roth IRA. While I feel great about being “in the black”, it’s really a false sense of accomplishment. I haven’t been able to chip away more debt – or rather – I haven’t been disciplined enough to chip more debt away. In fact, I have added to my debt through the use of an “emergency credit card”.

Again, I love tax season. This year I received a large chunk of money back from Uncle Sam and immediately threw that on top of my existing payments for this month. The result was a (near) 25% reduction in my credit card debt and a 54% increase in my overall net worth. If it weren’t for the big hit to my investment accounts – especially my 401(k) – I would be close to a zero net worth, which at this point sounds really, really good.

I kept track of my accounts in December, but didn’t get around to posting an update due to holiday travel and just plain laziness.  Obviously, I took a step backwards in credit card payments – which really were based on finance charges.  But as always, I’m really looking forward to the next few months since I tend to get a pretty nice tax refund which I apply directly to my debt.  I’m hoping to knock off one of my cards and increase my snowball payment amount.