Another $3,301 in student loans this month, plus a nice tax bill, and I knew I wasn’t going to be sitting pretty when I started tabulating up my net worth for March. Time to check out the damage:
Change: -$3,569 or -11.36 %
Hmm… it sounds bad, but I’m actually not too disappointed. The $3,301 increase in student loans (and a $258 increase in interest on the loans I already have) was inevitable, and I knew I was looking at a tax payment this month.
A tax payment? Yep. I made some money from this blog and from my freelance job last year, but not enough to owe any income tax. But, since those are both self-employment incomes, I did owe Social Security tax and Medicare tax. So I had a $260 tax bill to pay. No biggie, though – I also knew that was coming, and was at least partially prepared for it. I took all the money I’d stashed away in my various high yield savings accounts and threw them at the tax bill.
So if you ignore the student loans and the tax bill, I actually would have gone up by $250 this month! And $190 of that was paid toward my credit card balance – so that’s where I see the silver lining on this. I’m ahead of schedule for paying my balance off in full before I lose my promo 0% APR!
For a look at my assets and liabilities, check out my NetworthIQ for March. For an explaination of the categories I use, check out the bottom of my entry about February’s net worth balance.
oof! that chart hurts to look at, but then I read the explanation. Definitely get that credit card paid off before the 0% is used up.
Been a while since you’ve posted — keep it up! ๐
Ouch – It makes me wonder if its truly worth it to attend college if you cant get someone else to pay for it. Honestly if you save the money you would have otherwise spent on college.. Well time is money when it comes to compound interest.