r/personalfinance • u/WhiskeySauer • Dec 07 '16
My 6-Year Journey from $60K College Debt to $115K Net Worth & 816 Credit Score [OC] Other
Getting a good job, paying off your debts, living cheaply, and saving as much as you can is straightforward advice, but it has always been hard for to me follow it without having something to visualize. So I started doing all of my budgeting on my own in MS excel and I’m using it to help me visualize my financial decisions and plan out my strategy to retire early. Here’s the total breakdown of how I have spent every dollar I’ve earned over the last 6 years. By keeping my expenses super low I was able to pay off my debts pretty quickly and my credit score spiked to over 800.
Another great thing about budgeting on my own is that I can plan out the future easier. Here’s my projected spending into year 2030.
If you're interested, here’s how I gather the data to make these spreadsheets:
And here is a link to my spreadsheet template if you want to start your own budget for 2017:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0/view
Disclaimer: This is a cross-post from /r/financialindependence that I'm bringing here based off the attention the post received on my budget/chart layout.
edit: grammar
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u/Pulstastic Dec 08 '16
Of course rent control causes high prices. It depresses the prices of the unit actually subject to the control, but in the long run it decreases larger incentives to build more housing, leading to too-small housing stocks.
Yes, SF is in demand. But you're focusing on only one part of the supply-demand equation. Supply should be reacting to demand (via tons of new apartment buildings) but in SF it isn't. Why? Because Bay-Area politics fucks everything up.
You say that the situation is partially caused by SF being on a small peninsula. Maybe that's partially true. But if so, why is the rest of the Bay Area still so expensive? And even if SF's land area is limited, that still doesn't explain it. I enjoyed visiting SF a couple months ago. Beautiful city. But why oh why is so much of this "small peninsula" covered in quaint 2-story Spanish-style rowhouses? It makes zero sense. Somebody should go in and bulldoze whole blocks of them and erect half of downtown Chicago (whose rent, incidentally, is in comparison cheap as fuck) in their place. The fact that they politically can't is the kind of mismanagement that makes SF housing so expensive.
I can't speculate as to Toronto without knowing more about the city. All I can say is that I believe in basic economics.