Blogging Away Debt Blogging Away Debt follows real people on their journey to debt freedom — with tips on the debt snowball, budgeting, cutting expenses, and staying motivated.

by Matt Fildes

Good afternoon everybody!

Thanks to everybody for commenting on how they spend their typical Valentine’s Day on last week’s post.

For this V-day I budgeted $52 for a pair of concert tickets to go see a band (Milky Chance) that both me and the GF really like. The concert itself isn’t until April, so my plan was to get a hotel room and dinner for us that night- I would have paid for this as her birthday gift, which happens to be around the time of the concert.

Well…it turns out the night of the concert is her last final exam and group presentation for one of her graduate classes.  So unfortunately, it didn’t work out as I had planned. I’m going to sell the tickets (the concert is already sold out, so I should get face value for them) and plan on using that money to do a small weekend trip in April to a B&B we both really like (which has been less than $150 for the room and dinner when we stayed there before). Not the idea I originally planned, but still something she seems really excited for.

For my gifts (v-day and b-day combined), I got some very sweet (and inexpensive) items that I love but never buy for self- a bag of beef jerky, sour patch kids, gold fish crackers and ‘coupons’ (20 minute massage, 3 hours of uninterrupted guitar playing, etc…) which really made my day. And Sunday I got to spend all day doing whatever I wanted (played guitar, played with the dogs, nap) while she did all the chores normally assigned to me. It was wonderful. Despite what she paid for the gifts (couldn’t have been more than $20) I couldn’t have asked for more.

Edit- Here’s my card that she made (I wanted to show everyone):

Edit- Here’s the homemade bag she made:

Ok, so on to my financials! I finally took the juicer back and received store credit! (Edit- I asked for store credit but the amount showed back up in my checking account!)

Here’s what my monthly budget looks like so far this month:

My electric bill for this month ended being $11.04 less than expected, which was nice. The misc costs is a total of the concert tickets ($52.00) and my EZ-Pass bill ($25.00, I don’t have a line for this since it’s so irregular. I only get charged when my balance drops to below $10.oo and it automatically refills to $35.00 from my checking account, maybe once every 3-4 months).

My slush fund total increased by $9.00, to 0 out my checking account, to a balance of:

Slush Fund: $2,587.78

Here’s my debt totals to date:

I was able to pay $653.46 onto the balance of my smallest student loan, bringing that to a balance of $1,153.01. I should have this paid off in only 2 more weeks! To think, this was the loan that scared me the most (balance plus interest rate) not 1 year ago.