Monthly Update Single- December 2006
January is an extra special month for me this year because it marks the first month of my life as a married man.
I had quite a few changes in my life in 2006. The most important occurred only weeks ago when my wife and I were married. Because I originally started this blog with a snapshot of my finances while still single I want to show at least one month’s change of my finances before changing to a joint report. The addition of my wifes finances will make our position noticeably better in terms of income and savings. She will however, bring with her the remainder of her school loans which we will add to my educational debt.
Here are my Finances at the beginning of Jan 2007
A few notes on some of the large swings in some categories.
- I sold my car last month in anticipation of getting married. This move will free up about $500 month in free cash flow to be used towards debt payments and savings.
- The new $6000 in cash/savings is the balance from my car sale after I paid off my loan. I will likely put some of this into my Roth IRA for 2006
- I rolled my old Traditional IRA into my old Roth IRA to close it out. The balances on both of these accounts was low enough that I was charged a $12 yearly low balance fee on each. I intend to make a full contribution to my Roth for the 2006 year by the deadline in April to eliminate this fee.
- I will continue to slowly pay the minimum on my credit card debt at this time because it is sitting at 0%. As these offers expire I intend to pay off the balances and be free of credit card debt by the end of this year.
- The temporary increase in credit card debt was due to some large purchases at the end of the year due to the wedding and the holidays.
It’s always tough to watch your Net Worth go down but this will be a temporary blip. I’ll have another post with our new combined financial picture up shortly which will resolve that problem.
