October 2017 - How things look

Image: Nicole De Khors

We originally planned to space our first couple of posts a few days further apart, but we were honestly surprised by how many people viewed our first post and didn’t want to leave people hanging with just one lonely post. Now that you know a bit more about us, let’s get started.

It doesn’t look great, but I promise, it looks better than it did. We made some bad financial choices early on, and we’re digging out of that hole. I (Tyler) chose to go to a private university for a very specific degree, while Nicole went to a very reputable state school for her degree. I graduated with around $70,000 in student debt, and Nicole graduated with about $22,000. We also only had about $1,000 in our checking account and probably $4,000 in savings when we got married a little over 2 years ago. We also feel like we spent a little too much on my car, and we had to finance about $12,000 which we've been working really hard to pay off since then. Here's where we're at today:

Checking Account	~$4,000
Savings Account	$10,697
Investment Account 1	$3,579
Investment Account 2	$1,030
Tyler’s 401K	$8,935
Nicole’s 401K	$16,148
Credit Card Balances	$0
Tyler’s Private Student Loan	$38,675
Tyler’s Federal Student Loan	$15,297
Nicole’s Federal Student Loan	$11,220
Car Loan	$4,341
Tyler’s Monthly Take Home Pay	$3,532
Nicole’s Monthly Take Home Pay	$3,252

As far as other things that probably have some of you scratching your heads go, we realize the two small investment accounts are weird. The smaller one is a result of impulsively opening one account and then finding a far better deal about two weeks later. We realize that paying off debt is a far better use of our money than further investing right now (including our 401Ks, but we’ll fight that fight in another post), but these investment accounts are set up more as high-yield savings accounts. We wanted to have a larger emergency fund because of our new baby, but didn’t want all of that money sitting around collecting 0.3% interest. Our investments are mainly in lower-risk index funds, bonds, and a few select equities. We’re hoping not to touch this money for a long time and let it grow slowly, but still have it fairly easily available in case of an emergency.

There you have it! That’s where we stand. We won’t pretend it’s the perfect set-up, but we feel happy with where we’re going.

Next post we’ll share our monthly budget and a little bit of our plan for paying off our debt ASAP.

Thanks for reading, and please let us know if you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas for future posts!