Angry

Earlier this week I received a notice from AES saying that my loan has been deferred, when I didn't even ask for it to be! When I called to ask who had put that through, they told me it is state law that when they receive enrollment information from a university, the loan has to be deferred. I got a little snippy with the guy on the phone, considering this is my own loan and last time I checked, I am responsible enough to make choices regarding it. He told me I should write a letter asking for the deferment to be taken away, and they should put it back to normal. All I have to say is, they'd better.

This just makes me so angry, because they are obviously just trying to suck as much interest money as possible out of people. If you have the means to pay your bill each month, you should have every right to keep it under a normal status and keep paying it off. There's no reason for them to defer it without even asking. If people need a deferrment, they will ask for it themselves.

Financial Goals Review

On Thursday I got my last paycheck from my old job. It was a payout of all of my vacation time, and since I had about 90 hours saved up, it was even bigger than my regular paychecks were! All of that money went right into the Car Repair Fund in my savings account. I finally reached my savings goals on all three of the funds I started out with when I started this blog! In addition, I have $1,000 saved up for a new car, and am consistently working on paying down my student loan. Overall, I'm feeling quite accomplished today. And it's only 10 in the morning!

My checkbook is suffering!

I have decided that moving to a new town is very dangerous for my checkbook. This town is so awesome, and there's so much to do. I keep seeing all these cool restaurants and bars that I want to try, and I'm meeting and getting to know new people, all of which generally combine to = spending way too much money. Don't get me wrong, it's so much fun, but this kind of lifestyle does not suit a grad student's budget. Not to mention it's been hard on my body to adjust to the new heavy-on-alcohol, light-on-sleep student lifestyle that I've been away from for a year.

Basically my big problem is that this week alone I've spent all my spending money for both this week and next week combined! I know I should start saying no a little more often to balance things out, but it's hard when you are with a new group of people. If you keep saying no, they will stop asking you eventually, which I definitely don't want to happen. Hopefully things will calm down a little bit once the heavy studying kicks in later in the semester.

Networth

I've been tracking my net worth with NetworthIQ since April of this year, and I'm happy to report that it's gone up about $3,000 since then. I guess that's not too much, but I'm still excited about it. Now my Networth is only negative $4,648, even though I still have about $16,000 of debt left in the form of student loans. I think that's not bad at all. This summer I hope to get an extra job in addition to receiving my stipend, and put big chunks of that money towards my loan and my IRA.