October 2018 Debt Payoff Update: $8,010.47 Paid

by | Nov 2, 2018

Welcome to my debt payoff update for October 2018! In these updates, I detail our progress on our debt payments for the month and highlight any other updates in our financial situation.

I started this site to hold Mr. TMG and me accountable in our debt payoff journey. I also want to inspire and encourage others who are in debt (especially if you owe six figures like we do) by showing everyone that debt doesn’t have to be forever.

Whatever your numbers, I hope you find some inspiration in our story.

Let’s get to it!

Debt Payments

Here is a breakdown of all of our payments in October:

Mortgage: $1,120.05
FedLoan: $6,890.42

I still can’t believe we’ve finally made it to Mr. TMG’s student loan! It feels great to be able to make a payment that causes the balance to actually decrease rather than steadily increasing as it has over the past couple years. That was super frustrating.

To get a look at our journey to this point, check out our previous debt payoff updates:

I told you here that we’re generally following the debt snowball method, which has been working out really well for us. Mr. TMG also got a second job for a while, which sucked but helped accelerate our debt snowball.

Related: 21 Side Hustles You Can Start Today

We put any other extra or out-of-the-ordinary money, such as tax refunds, directly on our loans. (Check out the updates from February and March 2018, where we got thousands of dollars back on our tax refund and put it straight on our debt.)

All of these steps have helped us get to where we are today!

Updates

We’re still working our zero-based budget. With a zero-based budget, you budget every single dollar of your income in a given month. Your budgeted income minus your budgeted expenses should equal zero.

We balance our budget at the end of the month and make our extra debt payment at that time.

By doing it this way, our extra payment should include the budgeted payment amount and extra income we receive, along with any money we didn’t spend in our budget categories. We’ve settled into our budget and are doing great with it.

Aside from baby furniture and Christmas, we don’t have any big expenses planned for the rest of the year. We’re having our family at our house for Thanksgiving (including my brother-in-law and his family who haven’t met Little TMG yet!), so we’ve started thinking about our budget for that, but it shouldn’t be anything too crazy.

Remaining Balances

When we set out to pay off our debt and realized we had over $670,000, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

We’ve made so much progress since that day back in December 2016, and I’m super proud. Since we’ve finally made it to Mr. TMG’s loans, I feel like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a loooonnnggg tunnel, but I can still see it.

Here’s where we stand currently:

Grand Total: $565,316.87 remaining

As I mentioned last month, Mr. TMG’s loan has been on income-based repayment based only on his resident’s salary to this point. We had been filing our taxes separately so that my income wouldn’t be considered in calculating his minimum payment (hence the $20 minimum that wasn’t even touching the interest).

Because we knew that he would be graduating from residency and that we should be able to pay off my loans this year, we filed our taxes jointly for the first time last year.

The new minimum payment for his loan will be based on my salary and his salary as a resident last year. That new payment kicks in this month (November 2018) and is almost $2,000. (Woo chile!)

The minimum won’t change our strategy at all. We’ll keep putting as much as we can toward the loan to chip away at it.

Remember back in the day when we were knocking out a new loan every month? Sigh…

How did you do with your financial goals last month? Did you make the kind of progress you wanted to?

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