I started using Personal Capital to track my spending, however, I can’t link all my accounts yet so I do not have a good picture of my net worth. I am hopefully going to figure that out moving forward but I was able to at least calculate where I am at.

I am also thinking that weekly updates would be too much and that maybe monthly would be better since my financial situation does not change all that much on a weekly basis. Of course, this post is a bit different as I discovered something that I did not know last week but about that a little later.

I got paid on Friday and was able to put another $700 towards our debt. Other than my car we are close to paying off the last bit of interest-bearing debt. At the same time, I added a little bit back to my savings account. I have been using my savings account to pay off part of my debt but with us being close to not having any interest debt I decided to put money back into savings.

My current savings account sits at $12,042.21 with $1,144.56 in a separate investment account.

Our debts are now:

Credit Card 15: $1038 15.49% – paid $700
Automobile Loan: $24,244 1.9% – No Change
Installment Loan: $2,439 0% – No Change
Credit Card: $10,339 0% – No Change

With credit card 15 almost paid off my next goal would be to pay off the installment loan and then the last credit card. However, I do plan on paying down my car loan as well.

We do still have a medical bill that we have been paying down and that currently stands at $559, but I will pay that off with the second paycheck in July.

On to the interesting news and calculating my net worth.

I decided since I am now paying off most of my debt I want to contribute more towards retirement. My goal which may be a bit on the aggressive side is to have $500k by the time I am 55. This means that I have to save about 40 percent of my salary over the next seven years.

I currently contribute six percent to my 401k and my company matches another three percent as well as I have three percent going into a pension fund.

What I did not realize is that my 401k match and the pension were different accounts. When I was hired I was under the assumption that the three percent match was all the company contributed, so that upped my net worth by close to $10k, not a lot but more than I knew before.

With the retirement accounts and my current investment accounts I currently have a net worth of about $37k after you subtract all my liabilities. This is the first time it has been positive in years.

The plan at this point is to pay off the rest of my debts, aside from the auto loan, and up my contributions to my 401k. I exclude the auto loan as it sits at 1.9 percent and therefore at my current rate of return on my retirement accounts sitting at 6.89 percent, it makes more sense to add money to retirement than put everything extra to the car loan.

I do plan on paying that off early but also contributing as much as I can towards retirement. With the majority of debt out of the way, I will have close to 30 percent to put towards savings and retirement each month, with that number going up as we further reduce spending.

As I mentioned in a previous post I did have a few setbacks. My patio furniture payment is due in July, although this was necessary as I needed to be able to work outside during the pandemic.

It is also my daughter’s eighteenth birthday in a few weeks and we plan on having a few more luxuries than usually but still keeping it within our budget.

We also had a bit of good news on top of the pension realization, my wife’s doctor’s appointment which we were worried a bit about having to do surgery came up normal, so no issues there. We do have great insurance but with the possibility of having major surgery and the costs associated with it gave me a bit of anxiety.

My plan for the next few weeks is to continue to pay off debt while adding more to our savings. While I have been reducing my liabilities my stress has also been reduced. This has led me to spend less time worrying about how much I have in my checking account and putting more towards savings.

My latest interest has been the subreddit r/leanfire. While I am trying to retire with a good savings amount, learning about living frugally has been inspiring. I would love to retire and move to a different country. My daughter has plans to move to Korea after she receives her bachelor’s degree and I would love to move closer to her.

I have been doing the 50/20/30 method of budgeting and am now looking at a zero budget for the future. Finally thinking about what is next for me in my life and hoping that I am able to retire without having to take a job as a Walmart greeter. Not that there is anything wrong with that but working until I am dead is not a great plan to have.