In which I pretend to be a financially-savvy 20-something.

I wanted to write a quick update regarding a few of my Day Zero goals. I am on track to pay off my student loans in the next 12 months, which means only 1 more year until financial freedom (at least until I go back to grad school and do it all over again)! That means I will have paid off my student loans in just under 3 years (instead of 10, which I think is the repayment term of most of my loans). It’s pretty empowering and I can’t wait to have more money to put away in my savings because I love traveling and buying nice things.

As far as buying nice things, I still manage to get some nice things on occasion, even on my modest budget. This weekend while Corner and I were up in Santa Cruz, I got these 4 items above from Express for a grand total of $90. Granted I had to wade through racks and boxes full of clearance clothes (and I’m pretty sure Corner wanted to gouge his eyes out by the time I was done because he quickly found, tried on, and paid for 2 shirts by the time I was making my way to the dressing room), but I’d say it was worth it.

Here’s a visual breakdown of how I spent my money this past year. A few items of note:

• Health & Fitness includes my braces (I saw how big that category was and instantly thought but I don’t have a gym membership!)
• Other includes weird things like shipping services and eBay listing fees
• Pets is only as big as it is because Nigel got his teeth cleaned in January; I haven’t found owning a pet to be very expensive at all

This also helps fulfill my Day Zero goal of making cool graphs with my Mint.com data. :)

Speaking of Mint.com, I recently purchased Mint, which is a self-hosted web analytics program. Not that I have anything against good ‘ol free Google Analytics, but GA randomly stopped working on my site a few weeks ago and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it working again. I tried several different Google Analytics WordPress plugins and checked my source code to make sure the tracking code was installed, and it was, but still no statistics showing up in my Google Analytics dashboard. I finally just gave up and forked over the $30 for Mint. I use Fever as my RSS reader, so I was already familiar with another one of Shaun Inman’s products. I have been nothing but pleased so far.

If you’re curious, here’s a peek at what the interface looks like (click to enlarge):

Have I mentioned lately that the majority of my web traffic comes from the blog post I wrote last year about my stretched ear journey? I’m thinking of starting a second blog devoted to my stretched ears and giant plug collection. Or transitioning this blog to focus more heavily on my ears. Are my ears really cool enough to devote an entire blog to them??? Apparently random people searching Google think so. What do you think? Is looking at my ear jewelry really that fun?

Tagged as dayzero, financial, shopping