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.

I started using Mint.com a bit more religiously this past month as a way to set and track my spending in May. I was surprised to learn that I spent over 300% more than what I had planned to spend on “restaurants/eating out”. I’ll write a full post about what I’ve discovered using Mint.com, but one thing is for sure – I have to get real and start packing a lot more lunches now.

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.

Speaking of my 401k, I not only rolled my previous savings into my new account, but I have also upped my contribution due to a nice little raise at work. Things sure have changed since about a year ago.

My renewed commitment to pay down the debt is still going strong – I was able to throw $1,600 at it this past month. My goal for next month is to bring the total amount outstanding closer to $10K – so we’ll see how that goes.

Overall, my net worth has been knocked down somewhat due to money that didn’t end up being mine – but it’s okay – this is a more accurate picture of where I’m currently at and the NW# is still positive.

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”.

This brings up a few things:

1. Why didn’t I use my emergency savings? I am in a way – I’ve transfered out money to cover the amount that I’ve borrowed on the card. It just hasn’t hit the debt as of the time of this post.
2. Why do I own an “emergency credit card”?!

Well, I shredded all of my cards a while back and it turned out that was a mistake. The mistake wasn’t really shredding the cards, the mistake was that I wasn’t ready for it. Cold turkey sounds good – but my emergency fund wasn’t really set-up at the time. So when something hit – whether it was a car repair or something less of an emergency – I was screwed. In fact, I learned the hard way that you do need to keep one credit card around for work/travel. Car rental companies – at least National – don’t take debit cards when you take out a car. And hotels will take a debit card – but they put a large hold on your account right up front, which didn’t help my budget at the time.

Bottom line is that I know it’s bad to still have a credit card and it’s even worse to use that credit card. But I feel like as long as I’m honest with myself (on this blog) and work to pay the charge off (and more) as soon as I can, I am using credit responsibly.

…though, is there such a thing as responsible credit use when you’re still $14K in debt?

Almost back to zero and my debt has been reduced by almost $900 since the this time last month. I need to keep chipping away at that credit card debt number. It’s getting pretty low, so the snow ball is really picking up speed and has been providing a good feeling with each payment that is made – every little bit is show a deeper impact.

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’m not at all concerned about the investment accounts because I’m obviously in it for the long-haul and am a big believer in dollar cost averaging – so the way I look at it, stocks are currently on sale this week. That being said, I am going to start the process of rolling over my old 401(k) to the 401(k) I just started with my new company. I want all of that money working together. Especially once I have my debt paid off, since I plan to put my savings plans in overdrive to catch up on lost time – about a decade worth (man, that makes me angry).

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.

It’s really encouraging that my overall net worth is nearing positive numbers, but as I’ve mentioned before I know the main number that I need to focus on is how much debt I have on credit cards. I’m really hoping that 2010 is the year that I get out of debt and start building up some wealth while I wait for my student loan payments to start.

Pretty good progress across the board this month – though my savings did drop a bit due to some minor car repairs that couldn’t be put off.  The big news is that I dropped below (above?) the -10K net worth mark.  Though it’s the credit cards that really need to be my main focus.  I was able to put $783 towards them in October, so we’ll see if I can increase that amount to at least $1000 and make it consistent here on out.

So this October net worth update is extremely late, but I wanted to get it up on the blog before I post the November chart in a few weeks.  As you can see, not a lot has shifted.  I need to re-evaluate what money is going to where in order to make sure I’m throwing as much towards my debt as I can.

In fact, this has become even more urgent to me now that I did a quick estimation of the student loan debt that I will have upon completion of my MBA.  For about half a second, I considered starting a student loan debt payment account to begin collecting money to start off with a large lump sum payment.  However, I quickly realized that it would be smarter to pay down all of my other debts in the hope that once the new student debt shows up – it will be the only debt that I will need to focus on at that time.  Sure it will be big – but it will be really nice just to have the one debt item.

Now, that I wrote my intentions, I do have to be upfront in saying that I did just take a vacation. During the vacation I spent about $800 or so.  I take one vacation a year, and many have commented that I shouldn’t be taking vacations or spending money like that if I’m really serious about paying down debt.  However, that money comes out of a “vacation fund” that I do not count towards my net worth and, to be honest, I don’t regret getting away for a bit and recharging the batteries.  In fact, going away on vacation (with a dedicated fund / budget) is a nice way of showing yourself how life could be if you didn’t have to worry about money – which is the ultimate goal.

Anyway, it’s back to reality and time to really start planning for 2010 and how to make the most of it right from the start.  The end of the year is always tricky.  Just like vacation, I have a dedicated holiday or gift fund that I save up throughout the year (not counted towards net worth).  This way, the scramble for Christmas gifts doesn’t impact my budget or debt payment.  Plus, there’s the hope of year-end bonuses and next years tax refund to look forward to.  Usually, a nice boost to the plan.

All the asset accounts are up – especially savings and the liability accounts are slowly making their way down to zero.  I haven’t slowed my debt pay down, from what I can tell it’s a slight increase in finance charges that is negating some of the payoff.

Plus, there were some slight set backs this month since I just realized that I get paid every other week and not on set days of each month – as I believe I had originally been told.  Well the bills went out and the money didn’t go in, so I got hit with some overdraft fees and spend about half a week kicking myself.  I’m back on track now and don’t expect anything like that to happen again.

But little mistakes and finance charges won’t stop me or hold me up for long. Especially since today I paid off yet another credit card! Yep, the debt snowball keeps on rollin’ and that bigger payment of $300 has rolled into an existing $115 payment creating a – you guessed it – $415 monthly payment to the card with the next highest interest rate.

It’s ironic that the day I look forward to each month is the day that huge chunk of cash goes out of my account to pay down that debt.  It’s a sick sense of satisfaction watching the effect those big chunks have on that total debt number.