Can I Get It OFF Credit?

I paid off my student loans in January, but it seems I replaced one type of debt with another.

I attended PAX East in Boston in April. The hotel room for 5 nights ran me about $1,500, which I then matched for spending money to use on convention goodies, a trip to the casino, and food.

In May, my car's alternator failed. It ran me roughly another $1,000. Now as I'm approaching inspection time, I also had to put new tires on it ($600). These items, along with some recreational spending, has me in the neighborhood of $6,000 in credit card debt.

I have to make compromises in order to work on this debt. My emergency fund contributions are now 1% of income (which covers my Keep The Change feature at my bank). I've also put a freeze on new cryptocurrency buys, at least until I cut this debt in half. The market is chaotic at the moment, so it's probably a good idea to back off anyways.

But there is good news on the moving fund... IT'S OVER $9,000!

P.S.: I have full confidence with debt will be paid by my birthday (March). I am expecting a refund on my student loan payments and my annual bonus. I even started a new savings challenge to round things out.

Tax Year 2020 Complications

I thought tax year 2020 would be the most complicated year to date for me.

I had a software snafu in tax year 2019. The software I used (which I won't name here) buried forms regarding marketplace health insurance coverage. Their logic was this: the penalty for not having coverage was removed, so they hid the form as a whole. Since I wasn't asked about my coverage, I never entered the information. So I ended up paying back the marketplace coverage I had and it delayed my remaining refund by six months (peak pandemic time and all).

Thanks to economic relief efforts, I've enjoyed 0% interest on my student loans for most of 2020. The interest I paid during the first few months of the year was not enough to warrant an official tax form, so I had to submit a letter instead. When I file my taxes next year, I assume this will be the same case.

This is also my first year with cryptocurrency. I started off with about $40 in Bitcoin in January of 2020 and by the end of the year my portfolio grew to about $200. When I made my account on Coinbase, I went through the lessons to earn other cryptocurrencies and made some exchanges to get the other coins for which Coinbase offered rewards. Two surprises came from this: Bitcoin is not my largest asset (the honor goes to Maker at roughly 20%) and I actually lost $59 on conversions.

Finally, I received stimulus checks in the last year. I did have to report the amounts of the checks to my tax professional, but I was well within the income limits to receive them.

I am receiving a refund this year, but I will write about how I plan on using it once the money materializes.