Six months after I graduated my loans entered repayment.  It took me a little while to really understand what was happening with my loans.  The summer after I started repayment I developed a notebook system for tracking my loans' stat changes that taught me a lot about my loans.  It helped me understand my loans, the changes that occur with them and how much I still owe.  Although I included a picture below of April 2017’s notebook page, that is not today’s topic.
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Today I wanted to finally introduce you all to my loans and my plan for paying them off.  My boldore budget allocates money from my paychecks each month to keep my student loans well fed.  We have developed a meal plan that it follows when determining how many payment puffs each loan servicer gets.  Then each loan servicer has an individual meal plan that determines how those puffs get eaten by the individual loans they service.

A lot of people use the website/app Mint to help them manage their personal finances.  Mint is a simple, one-stop shop for people to see the current status of their finances.  A user connects their bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investments and bills to it.  Once connected, Mint can create graphs and other ways to help their users understand their money.

Mint also has a bunch of systems set up to assist their users with their money.  It’s like a chikorita using aromatherapy to restore health to a person’s finances.  With all of their shell bells and grass whistles, I did not find their aromatherapy helpful and canceled my future appointments.
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I tried it for at least three months and did not find it useful to me.  Not all of my accounts could connect, there was too much red, my own systems were better for me and I rarely checked it.  I am sure it has improved in the past two years, but I think I’m fine without it for the moment.

​As a trainer, I like to always have a good set of poké balls with me.  I never know when I’ll need to grab one to catch an unknown pokémon and help make my team stronger.  Once I catch a pokémon, I learn all about them by battling with them and by entering their info in my pokédex.  Then when I encounter them again in battle, I understand how to defeat them and how they may hold me back.
 
I feel that a common struggle with personal finance is that fear and anxiety act like unknown Pokémon.  Fears of not knowing how much debt someone has or needing to cut back can hold people back.  Once we enter them in our "feardex", we start to understand how they hold us back.  We just need to have the poké balls to stand up and catch our fears so we can make them our own.

​Welcome to May!  The first week in May means that it’s time for April’s Review and Net Worth Update.
 
For those who are new to The Grown-Up Pkmn Trainer, each month I write a financial review to xatu my net worth by writing down my thoughts on the previous and following months.  I share these summaries so everyone can gain insight into my personal finances and my thoughts behind them.
 
I started tracking my net worth to measure my progress, inspired by Budgets Are Sexy, which has helped me pay closer attention to my personal finances.  I have been tracking my net worth since January 2015 and writing monthly financial reviews for myself since 2016.  I recommend tracking net worth because it has been such a helpful tool to see my personal finances stat changes all in one place.