I started this summer with $4,200 in debt(probably closer to 5k with interest). Just from being away at school and kinda being short on cash at some rough points in time. Anyway, I started the summer off by finding an internship. I was back and forth with myself on wether or not I should pay off a lot of my creidt card debt with the money I was making. After aksing around on here a lot of you suggested I just pay off as much as possible and keep my head down and save. Well, after I started to pay off my debt more and more I started enjoying to see it go down. I eventually made two lump sum payment this past month and a half (totaling I think 2.2k) and got all of my debt down to $0! (Besides school, already have a plan of attack for student loans). I nearly spent about 80% of my earnings this summer on debt/interest, Everything else was expenses (car payment/insurance, food, gas etc). However, I was lucky enough to get offered a full time position, gaining a pay increase. I am going to be ending the summer (which for me is before the school year starts) with about 3,000 saved. Going into the school year I will be working full time plus OT every weekend (night classes/online). I started a Roth IRA, which I will be contributing too (not maxing out) just to get started and get my feet wet to understand everything better. I'll be using my OT pay split between IRA and Student loans(about 320 a month for each I can do). As for now I am looking to really build up a better emergency fund. I know I will have 3k, but I want to get to 10k in a savings account (about 4 months worth of work). After that, I plan to start using more of my paycheck to pay off student loans aggressively. I would like to have them gone in about 1.5 to 2 years(going to be less than I thought, totalling about 18k in loans).
Anyway, it's time to put my head down and just save now, keeping my OT money for student loans and retirement. Everything else will go into emergency savings/expenses for the month. So again, thank you everyone here!
Submitted August 18, 2018 at 10:41AM by dand06 https://ift.tt/2OMp3EB
