First things first – yes, I really do sit down and dedicate a good deal of my time to revising and reviewing these documents. I’ve been doing this for a few years now with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that I created from scratch and it is a tremendously effective method for forecasting my financial intake and outflow (i.e. money in and money out). If you haven’t created these types of documents for yourself and you are trying to dig out of serious debt or just want to be a more fiscally sound individual, then I highly suggest sitting down and creating a spreadsheet that works for you. Let me know if you have any questions because my spreadsheets rock!

Now then…

It would appear that I am doing less in 2010. I’m not quite sure how to quantify what “doing less” means in a specific way other than saying that I’m doing less of everything that people normally do. I’m going out to eat less, I’m going out to the store less, I’m buying less clothing, I’m driving the car less, I’m hanging out at the bar less, etc. Does that make any sense? In essence, the 29th year of my life is going to be a year marked by a great reduction in my student loan debt that was made possible, in part, by doing much less. There is a symbiotic relationship there – spend less money by “doing less” of the activities listed above and spend more money on repaying student loan debt.

In the short-term, it obviously sucks doing less of these activities. But in the long-term, I’m doing so much more. I’m setting myself up to be able to buy a home sooner rather than later; I’m setting myself up to be financially free much sooner than most people; I’m ingraining a strict budget mindset in my life which will pay dividends (figuratively and literally) for the rest of my life. It’s great.

So, while I won’t be doing much for the rest of this year, rest assured that I’m spending my time laying a strong financial foundation on which to build my future.

And now for some fun, numbers crunching stuff!

This year alone I project about $36 thousand in student loan payments (pretty gross, huh?). By December 31, 2010, I project holding about $65 thousand in student loan debt broken out as about $54 thousand in USDOE debt and about $11 thousand in NJHESAA debt. These projections are based on a repayment plan that is even more grueling and strict than the one that I am currently on because it incorporates income that I expect to receive from teaching at the local and online colleges through the end of the summer and this fall. Up until I began drafting this proposed stricter repayment plan for myself, I’ve never banked on teaching income for these types of payments. However, when I was doing all of this the other night, I wanted to create the most rigorous financial assumptions possible and so I decided to include them for the student loan repayment projections only. In other words, the student loan repayment projections are based on a best of all possible worlds scenario while my personal budget forecast is based on projected income and expenses outside of the teaching income.

Another item that isn’t included in any projections is income derived from my website company because, well, it’s a separate and independent entity and it creates its own financial statements. I don’t take a salary for my web work, so I don’t anticipate any “new” income coming to me from that source. I also don’t bank on any federal income tax or state tax rebate checks (this only applies to the student loan repayment projections since the projection document that I created extends out through April 1, 2011… and even a few more months beyond that date).

A final income category that I don’t touch is the possibility of getting a raise at my day job. To stay conservative in my financial projections, I opted to assume my income level stays stagnant at its current level (though I better be getting a raise at the end of September!).

Again, while my friends and family may not think that I’m doing much this year, rest assured that I’m spending a great deal of time putting all of my financial assets to work. Now, if I can find a way to incorporate getting some more physical activity in my daily routine and drop some of this weight… Hey, if I can manage an overly complex repayment plan, investment schedule, and ever changing personal budget, I can manage to workout a little bit more, right?

Hmmm…

And so here we are.

In the last two days I’ve done really well in the stock market – like absurdly well. Granted, I’ve only been investing for about fourteen months, but yesterday and today were significant. I managed to bring my total earnings back up to above 100%. Most investors get excited about 10% – 15% gains and I am admittedly greedy by looking for triple digit percentage gains, but it’s my money so of course I want it to be wildly successful in the market! And yes, I understand that this is the market that we’re talking about and that there’s a strong chance that I’ll lose much of the last two days worth of gains in the next two days, but that’s part of the game.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my overall financial situation in a much larger picture. Since I started college in Fall 1999, I’ve been at a negative net worth. When I graduated Graduate School in Spring 2006, that negative net worth was approximately $121,000. That’s pretty bad. In fact, that’s absolutely horrendous. However, that negative net worth was comprised of 100% student loan debt. In the last few years, that number hasn’t really moved…until 2009.

In 2009, I rid myself of an automobile that sucked my savings account nearly dry, I committed myself to at least doubling the funds in my savings account (I wound up tripling them), and I lived according to an extremely strict budget which I planned at the beginning of the year and then micromanaged daily throughout the year.

But what’s interesting to me (and what prompted this entry) is that in 2009 I also committed myself to donating more money to nonprofit organizations. In other words, while I was trying to increase my net worth from a negative number to a positive number I was actually giving money away! Though I haven’t run the final numbers yet, I think that 2009 might have been my most charitable year on record. I might have given away more than $7,500 last year. For a guy who began the year with a net worth that was already $100,000+ in the hole, that’s an incredible feat.

Then I see days like today and yesterday where my stock portfolio jumps.

Then I think about how I know that I have another check already sitting at one of the student loan payment centers which will allow me to make another announcement about my total student loan debt dropping before the end of January.

Then I think about my negative net worth slowly inching towards a positive number.

Then I check my 401k and realize that it’s not doing so bad, either.

And after all of that I begin to see much more clearly that my total student loan debt (which is my only debt) is measurably decreasing while my investments, savings, and retirement funds are measurably increasing. That’s significant. That’s the result of creating a budget and micromanaging that budget throughout the year. That’s the result of making a plan and sticking to it – of committing yourself to being in a better financial position tomorrow than you are today.

That’s something to be happy about.

I was sitting at my desk reviewing my personal finances (which is a nightly ritual for me) and I was thinking about how I used to use both Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken software. These days I don’t use anything besides some spreadsheets that I created and, frankly, they work great! But as I was going over my finances I started to think about the old Mint.com account that I opened up about a year ago before shutting it down.

Some months ago I remembered hearing that Mint.com was purchased by Intuit, which I thought was a real shame since Mint.com had a great user interface and was very user-friendly. Intuit doesn’t have the best record on either of those issues. Anyway, as I was thinking about this stuff I pulled up the New York Times website and wouldn’t you know that there was an interview with the creator of Mint.com (who is now a Vice President at Intuit) right there on the front page? It was a good interview, too! For example, I found out things like this…

Q. Are there parts of corporate culture that you find strange?

A. The corporate campus seems so quiet. A start-up is overflowing with energy. Here it’s a little more subdued. They’ve got these high, very depressing cubicles.

If I wanted a new computer or had some I.T. issue at Mint, I just walked to the tech ops team and they would get me set up in a couple of minutes. At Intuit, being a big company, you call the help desk, and the help desk has been outsourced to some foreign country — I can’t place the accent. They really have no idea of where you are or what your needs are. It’s the standard phone service when you get sent to a foreign country, but this is an internal help desk. It’s a real pain. I expressed this to one of my Quicken colleagues and he said, “Yeah, we just never call the help desk. Don’t bother, here’s who you need to call to skirt around the system…” I thought, that’s sort of dumb in a bureaucratic way.

But at the same time, a big company has processes with much more rigor than what we ever had in a start-up. They have great specialization when it comes to retail, packaging, search engine marketing or affiliate programs. And the financial rigor of a big company is phenomenal in terms of projections, making sure everything is on track on a weekly basis, or reporting your numbers — they’re very, very good at that sort of thing.

I found that interesting, but I also like reading about corporate culture. The interview – linked above – is a short read and one that I think you’ll enjoy if you’re interested in the internet and technology or just how entrepreneurs are integrated into established organizations.

Sure, no individual needs to use both of these programs at the same time. However, as I own my own business, I used Quicken for the business and Money for my personal finance needs and it worked great for years. Then, earlier this year Quicken essentially stopped supporting my version of the software and told me that I had to update (i.e. purchase an upgrade) in order to keep using their program. Not happening.

Instead, I looked into Money and realized that I could easily manage my business accounts under a separate listing and thus moved everything over to that program and uninstalled Quicken. It was somewhat sad to see the program go, but it was the best financial decision. So if you’re keeping score – Quicken is now gone from my system.

Oh, and bear in mind that this is all going on during the same time period where I’ve essentially decided that I want to strip my computer of all non-essential software and remove myself from superfluous websites. Frankly, since I started this stripping down process, my computer runs smoother and I have an incredible amount of room to store pictures, music, and documents. It’s great! But I digress…

During the last few years I’ve also created a series of spreadsheets that monitors and tracks my every expense down to the penny. Some people would consider that level of personal financial management to be a bit overboard, but at 28 years old (and saddled with $98,000 in student loan debt), I think it is absolutely critical to know where my money is and what it is doing. Also, my use of a certain spreadsheet to plan for upcoming expenses has allowed me to have $0 in credit card/consumer debt while increasing the total dollar amount of other, “good” expenses like donations and money put into savings accounts and the stock market. Money provided tremendous assistance in getting me to the point where I could create my own financial spreadsheets and have them actually mean something. However, last week I removed Microsoft Money Plus from my system.

As I started this post with – this one should have hurt, but it didn’t…at all. Somewhere along the line, Microsoft stopped supporting their Money series to the level that they support, say, and Office suite. I guess that the increasing sales of Office and other Microsoft products necessitated a shift in focus away from personal finance. Plus, with great free personal finance websites popping up (like Mint.com, which was actually purchased by Quicken), I imagine that the powers that be at Microsoft didn’t think that there was a lot of future profit potential in the Money line.

So, the latest software to get removed from my system is Microsoft Money Plus. I wonder which program will be next…