Sunday, October 29, 2017

Our First Month of Blogging!



Our first month of blogging comes to an end tomorrow, here are some of the highlights, lessons learned and goals for month number two!  The purpose of this post is transparency, I want everyone to see how we are growing/succeeding or failing at this venture while in the meantime enjoying every second.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

The True Cost of Monthly Spending


Hello everyone, Mr. DebtFree here.  In this post I will show you how your unnecessary monthly spending could be delaying your retirement for years and costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars.  We will use my imaginary friend Frank's spending to illustrate this idea.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Stock Purchases End of October Update!

The debt portfolio has grown for a second time this month with a few vanguard fund additions.  These purchases are as follows:

VDC 7 shares @ $138.25
VDE 5 shares @ $92.21
VT    1 share  @ $72.00

The new total portfolio value is $27,307, up $3,139 this month.  I currently predict the value of this portfolio to be equal to or greater than our mortgage in 3.1 years.  Check out the updated portfolio here.


Step 1 Complete!

Ms. DebtFree checking in on an exciting-to-me financial update!  If you aren't up to speed on my personal debt disaster, check out my first post or Mr. DebtFree's battle plan to tackle my finances.

Today marks the end of my first three months of work as a registered nurse.  I'm feeling pretty good about the goals I've met at work so far and now I'm finally hitting some of my finance goals!

Friday, October 20, 2017

Personal Finance Battle Plan: Ms. DebtFree

Mr. DebtFree here, in this post I will be laying down the framework for how we are approaching Ms. DebtFree's financial situation.  This is a real life case study of Ms. DebtFree and how we are setting her up for financial success.

Case Study:

Name: Ms. DebtFree
Age: 26
Status:  Graduated Nursing School August 2017 and begins full time work as an RN.
Starting Salary: between $50,000 and $60,000 per year (dependent on shift work and overtime)
Starting Debt: $94,688 with interest rates ranging from 3.4% to 7.9%
Starting Cash: ~$200
Starting Invested: $130
Average Monthly Spending: ~$1,600 (does not include loan payments)
Average Free Cash Flow:  $1,700 (Income - Spending)

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Anti-Frugal Spending

From my favorite show: Parks & Rec


Ms. DebtFree here with some transparency about my spending this month.  If I haven't mentioned this already, I really like shopping and a lot of my blogging is for personal accountability about my spending.  Well, this month I definitely had some frivolous purchases and figured I better fess up before we review our end of the month spending.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Debt Portfolio Project: October Update 1

Mr. DebtFree here, I have made my first stock purchases for the Debt Portfolio Project in October.  I shoved ~$1,500 more into the portfolio with purchases of :

5 shares VDC @ $138.29 per share
10 shares VNQ @ $83.76 per share
1 share VT @ $71.55 per share

So far this month the portfolio has increased from $24,168.00 to $26,053.00 a gain of $1885.  Using the 4% rule this new investment will increase our monthly passive income by $6.28 forever.  Gotta love putting your dollars to work for you!  Check out the progress of the portfolio below.






Monday, October 16, 2017

E-Fund Update

After 2 months of work, I (Ms. DebtFree) am very excited to announce that I have almost reached my emergency fund savings goal and have almost hit the $1,000 investment mark.

That may not sound like much, but for me it is a huge personal accomplishment.  Frugality is a new concept for me and I'm happy to say so far I'm doing great at following Mr. DebtFree's financial plan for me!


Who Needs Car Insurance Anyways?

Photo Credit

Ms. DebtFree here with a quick update on one of my "new job savings goals": car insurance premium discounts!

For the past 11 years I've been insured with the same company.  If some of you are paying close attention to our ages, that means I started driving at 15 with a driver's ed learner's permit.  So, after 11 years of being insured with State Farm I figured it was time to get additional discounts.  I should warn you, this post is partially about my attempt to save money but mostly a rant about the b.s. I went through trying to be more frugal!

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Passive Income Project



Mr. DebtFree here, today I want to talk about a new project I am working on.  From our September Spending Update you can see that we were on the hook for about $3,300 in monthly spending.  While I believe that we can lower our monthly spending with some simple frugal tactics I will use $3,300 as a baseline for this new project.  Simply put, I propose to grow multiple different passive income streams until they are equal to our baseline $3,300 spending.  Let's lay down the groundwork for how we can get there!

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Emergency Fund Roadmap



Ms. Debt-Free again!

My last post was probably extremely boring for a lot of you, unless you also understand the pull of Target and Sephora!  Today I want to get a little more serious and practical and talk about building an emergency fund.

This was a totally new concept for me when I met Mr. DebtFree.  I was skeptical at first.  I mean, how the eff can I build an emergency fund when I have almost $100,000 in student loans I need to pay off?  Eventually I stopped whining long enough to ditch the bad attitude and listen.  Here's what I learned.  

Monday, October 9, 2017

A Week of Unsubscribing

Hey there, Ms. DebtFree checking in for the week! 

Alrighty, so I promised I would be totally honest on here, yeah?  Well, I love shopping.  More specifically, I love discount shopping.  And in order to get great discounts what have I done?  Subscribed to emails from all of my favorite stores.  Apparently every store I’ve ever been to in my life became a favorite in just one trip! 

My personal challenge for the week was to find ways to cut back on shopping, or at the very least find ways to decrease the temptation to go shopping.  My work schedule has been absolutely bananas (politically correct way of saying “complete sh*t”) the last week or so and I didn’t have it in me to spend a lot of time or energy on saving money.  So, I came up with a completely free and relatively easy way to change how often I think about shopping: unsubscribe to any email from a store.  Sounds simple, right?  I discovered that’s not always the case.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Debt Portfolio Project



Mr. DebtFree here!  Ms. DebtFree wrote about her current situation with ~$95,000 in student loans previously in this post.  Now it's my turn to share my personal debt status!

While she is just taking her first steps towards tackling student loans, I am already five years down the road in my personal journey to financial freedom.  While good ol' Uncle Sam paid most of my school bills I still graduated with ~$13,000 in debt and almost nothing in the bank.  While slowly paying down these low interest rate loans, I also purchased a well-priced starter home on a short sale in 2014 for $143,000 at 4% interest.  This was done with $0.00 down --once again due to the generosity of Uncle Sam.  Quite the deal for serving just four years in the military!

My current debt situation is a remaining mortgage balance of $127,761.  While Ms. DebtFree is furiously eliminating student loan debt I plan on applying the same level of effort to the annihilation of my mortgage debt.  The goal is for us to be completely debt free within 5 years.

Monday, October 2, 2017

Save for Tomorrow While You Live for Today

Courtesy of Pinterest

“You have to financially plan for your future, but you better enjoy today because you just never know.”  These words from a nurse of 30+ years as she addressed my residency cohort last week have been on my mind a lot.  Especially today.  The day after one of the worst mass shootings in recent U.S history seems like an odd day to write about happiness, but I think it proves our instructor’s point: you just never know.