Debt Costs So Much!
Nothing new here… just me trying to convince you to GET RID OF YOUR DEBT again. I have decided to really hammer this point home in the hopes that I might pass some of my “I HATE MY DEBT” passion on to others.
Here are the other posts I have written about How Much Our Debt Costs. Check them out AFTER you read this article.
- Interest Amount Paid – Establish a Proper Relationship with Your Debt
- How much Interest are YOU Paying?
- How Much Does Your Debt Cost? – on FiveCentNickel.com
So yeah… as you can tell I am really trying to drive this point home.
I decided to do a few things.
- Post monthly updates reporting how much my debt costs me.
- Create a spreadsheet that calculates it out automatically.
- Share that spreadsheet with you! Tomorrow’s article will give more details on this and will have a link to my Google Docs Spreadsheet. It will be free of change and will easy to use… just the way I like it. It will have calculations for each month and will include the cool graph that you see above – which is reporting my actual principal/debt amounts each month.
November Update – How much our debt cost us this month
*Shrugs* Writing about this always makes me mad because I can’t help but think about all the things I would rather be doing with MY MONEY! Oh well… soon enough. Patience young Jedi!
Without further ado…
October 2009 Interest Paid | November 2009 Interest Paid |
Mortgage 1 – $587 | Mortgage 1 – $586 = +1 |
Mortgage 2 – $294 | Mortgage 2 – $294 = 0 |
Student Loan 1 – $156 | Student Loan 1 – $161 = -5 |
Student Loan 2 – $115 | Student Loan 2 – $126 = -11 |
Lending Club – $83 | Lending Club – $70 = +13 |
Chase Credit Card – $2 | |
Total Interest Paid – $1,237 | Total Interest Paid – $1,237 = 0 |
You may have noticed several things…
- Our October interest is $2 more than previously reported. That is because we paid off my wife’s Chase credit card in September and were hit with a $2 interest charge on the preexisting balance and I was unaware of it when I posted.
- Our Lending Club interest was quite a bit lower. Hooray! This was because of our enormous extra principal payment in October. We are able to pay a little extra in November too but not nearly as much.
- Our Student loan interest was higher this month. What’s up with that right? Although we did indeed reduce the principal student loan interest is calculated daily and our automatic payment date fell on a Saturday and therefore had to be pushed back to Monday, adding two extra days of interest charges. In the long run it doesn’t effect us because next months calculation will be on two less days so it will look deceivingly lower. This is an important point to note when considering the monthly interest paid on your student loans.
The “How Much Your Debt Costs” Spreadsheet & Graph
As I mentioned above, I have created a really cool spreadsheet that does all the calculations for you and also gives you this nifty little graph allowing you to track your progress.
The spreadsheet will also give you the interest amounts paid for each month in HUGE BOLD numbers for you to print off and stick on your fridge.