January 2024
It's been a while since my last update, so we'll have quite a jump from October 2023 to today!
Main goals
Keep paying down those loans, baby!
Major developments
Positive net worth after 2 years!!! Finally!
We finally got all the income driven repayment loan details, and thankfully in sum they were all lower than what I had initially projected, so no issues there.
On the other hand, we are now facing a lot of travel expenses and it's a bit tough for me to figure out how to navigate this! I guess moving to the Midwest makes cost of living very attractive for us, but since we're far from everyone, it's tough to balance wanting to see people for major milestones in their lives (as the travel expenses are mostly related to weddings and such) versus paying down the student loans once and for all.
In the end, we decided that we wanted to go ahead and travel for 2 weddings, but cut down on the other travel plans we had to focus on paying down the loans hopefully by 2026 latest.
The numbers
| Category | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Net worth | $14k | First time assets outweighed our student loans |
| Rent and utilities | $1.2k | |
| Groceries | $0.7k | Alcohol costs spiking this up |
| Medical and health-related | $0.1k | |
| Transportation | $0.1k | |
| International / visa-related | $0 | |
| Home maintenance and supplies | $0.01k | |
| Pets | $0.07k | |
| Dining out | $0.3k | |
| Entertainment | $0.08k | |
| Gifts | $0 | |
| Miscellaneous | $0.1k | |
| Total | $3.3k |
