Welcome to the February update!

Another slow month as we are still holding some cash as we adjust to receiving one of our salaries monthly. I spent a bit of time reworking our spreadsheets this month, tidying them up, while also incorporating some feedback from Reddit that I should invert our line graphs so that our journey can be tracked from being in debt and into our saving/investing phase. As such they now show our combined debts as negative, slowly climbing to zero, and then as we start to save for our emergency fund will continue upwards.

Now lets look at the numbers:

Forecast Feb Consolidation Loan $ 12,116.50 Credit Card A $ 0 Credit Card B $ 5,182.58 Credit Card C $ 5,365.42 Total $ 22,664.50

Actual Feb Consolidation Loan $ 16,966.61 Credit Card A $ 0 Credit Card B $ 5,180.09 Credit Card C $ 5,457.52 Total $ 27,604.22

The gap between our revised forecast and actual is now at $4,939.72. However, we are holding around $2,000 in cash while we adjust to the different timing of our salaries. This is likely counter intuitive, but I feel more comfortable simply holding a bit of cash for a month. We are still ahead of our original forecast by $8,103.62. I am confident we will be able to close the gap once things stabilise. Here is a look at the new graph:

I think this is a much better way to represent the data, and as the blog progresses into the years ahead we will be able to look back to a time when all of our additional cash was being directed to paying down our debts. I’ve also changed our over all net worth tracking into a simple line graph, as a lot of people mentioned it didn’t make sense the way it was being represented. Once we are debt free I will continue to have two graphs, one showing our investments and continued progress outside of super, and a total net worth including super. As such our current net worth is $36,480.29 as at the 28th of February, represented visually below:

Looking forward to more progress in March!