Financial

Debt reduction

As I have gotten myself into debt due to lack of control and education in my younger days, I’m having to work hard to get rid of over $50,000 in student loans, credit card debt, and a car loan. Besides a small amount going to savings for my emergency fund, everything is going to my debt. As long as I stay on course I should be consumer debt free by the end of 2021, and student loan free by 2022 with a total of almost $5,000 in interest paid. With compound interest calculations, I have essentially lost out on nearly $500,000 in future gains I could have had if I didn’t have this debt to pay off.

To pay down my debt, I’m using a modified Debt Avalanche to get everything paid off. The Debt Avalanche is the method where you pay the minimums on everything and every single penny left over after expenses (and some savings to be safe) goes towards the highest interest debt. For the most part I am following this, but with a small windfall, I was able to pay off my car which was a $250/ month payment. Plus my insurance dropped $10/month once I paid off the car so lets call it $260/ month can now go to debt payoff. I got a personal loan to lower the rate on my $10,000 in credit card debt, and have saved myself a couple thousand dollars in interest in the process.

Side Hustle

There are an infinite number of side hustles anyone can do. Walk dogs, ridesharing, part time jobs, blogging, crafting/creating, dropshipping, and much, much more. Since the job I currently have is a passion job in the entertainment field, it pays the medium bucks. I could move to a bigger city and hope to get in with a bigger company and pay more in rent and living expenses, but I like where I’m at and the company I work for. So to make extra dough, I look to the side hustle. At the moment, I drive for Uber Eats, and I do some freelance designing with schools and a few local groups for theatrical lighting design. The design pays peanuts, but I love it. Over the pandemic, I bought a 3d printer and am currently eyeing up a hobby CNC router, and would like to dabble in using that to start a side business.

Investing

I started out using Acorns to invest once I realized that I could make my money work for me. Within a year, I had saved up $1,000! Which was huge for someone who was a financial moron, like me. As I went down the rabbit hole on investing and how someday I could be rich, I realized how much I was spending in fees. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the platform and how the rounding up to save thing worked. But it did come at a price. When I hit the $1,000 mark, I transferred everything to vanguard and bought me the minimum buy-in for Vanguard’s STAR Fund (VGSTX). Once again, I was a moron but a little bit less. I bought in because that was one of the few funds that had the low minimum of $1,000. My eventual goal is to transfer up to the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, but that’s a little bit away.

Because I know better than everyone else, I threw a couple hundred bucks into Peer-to-Peer lending. With $400 invested, I have made a whopping -$80 because I went too risky and someone from North Carolina defaulted on their loan which had me lose the remaining $96 in principal they had yet to pay back. luckily my other bets have helped me come back. After realizing my mistake, I’ve decided to no longer deposit my own money in and just let the gains pay for new notes and hopefully I’ll be able to make a profit off of it in the long run.

Eventually my wife and I are hoping to look into investing in Real Estate. Mainly Multi family homes to share the load on expenses like the roof and siding and whatnot. We’re debating that when we have the money to buy our first home, that we house hack in a duplex. This is a couple years down the road as we both want to be debt free before we get to a house. Not to mention that home prices are over inflated around us. A $180,000 single family home right now was less than $100,000 5 years ago. We’re going to be patient and make our first purchase from a position of strength and hope we can time the bubble pop.

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Questions? Comments? Jokes? Random facts about dogs?