We have debt... but we also have goals. One of the hardest things for us to do is to balance those two things.

We have a decent emergency fund saved up. We have enough saved for two months of bare bones expenses. I know that money could be used towards debt, but then where would we be if an emergency hit? We are still living during a pandemic and still unsure of the future, (not that you can ever be sure of the future, but I think you know what I mean).

We actually have more than two months saved, we have an additional $2000, and growing, that we are putting towards some of our savings goals. I know it's counterintuitive to have savings goals when we still have so much consumer debt, but there are still things we want/need.

The last thing we were saving for was ring repair for a bunch of my rings. That has been taken care of. I am awaiting the completion of the work, but it has been paid in full, with cash!

On our list currently is:

New TV's (X2) The TV in our family room is 12 years old and actually "broke" the other day. Its screen went completely blank, though the sound continued to work. The Husband tried troubleshooting the problem and can't get it to work, so we are going to replace it. The TV in our spare room (actually my mom's bedroom now) also has a "dark area" down the middle third of the screen.  This TV is only 4 years old as it was purchased when we moved into the house. Not too happy about that!

New mattress: our current mattress will be 20 years old in December. We really need a new mattress! We bought both The Kids new (bigger) mattresses when we moved, and they finally got their own room. We bought a new mattress for us too, but I hated it, so we put it in the spare room and brought the old mattress back into our room. We will do some serious research before purchasing anything!

Fireplace insert: I want a fireplace in my bedroom! I am totally aware that this can wait, but it is something I really want, so we have decided to save for it. We have priced them out and we are going to be able to get everything we want for $500. I realize that this is in no way a need, but we are willing to save for it in order to have it before we are out of debt.

New (used) car: Again, this is not a need, but a convenience for us. The Daughter has started driving and will take her test in the next few months. It would make our lives so much easier if she had a car to drive. She does not need one, we do not need for her to have one, but it will be worth it for us if she has a car to drive so we don't have to chauffeur her around every day! (Between school, extra-curriculars, and competitive dance, her schedule is crazy busy sometimes!) We will not buy a car as soon as she gets her license, but probably 3-4 months after. Since our last car was paid off, almost 3 years ago, we have continued to put $400 into savings every month as a "car payment". We bought a used truck for The Boy to drive with that money and will buy a used car, probably a Honda Civic or the like, for The Girl to drive. We are hoping that by the time we are actually ready to buy, used car prices will have come down.

With the money we already have saved towards these items, and what we plan to save in the next 6 months, we think we will be able to purchase all these things, with cash.  How they are listed is probably the order we will purchase them in.  All of this savings is on top of our emergency fund. We won't be using our emergency fund to purchase any of these items. This is new/additional savings.

There are other things we would love to buy but are waiting until we get out of debt to do those: new floors, remodeling the bathrooms in our house, new light fixtures, a new car for me. But those things can wait.

Wow! How has it been three months since I blogged? I had no idea it had been so long until I looked at the date of my last entry!

Things have been slowly chugging along. We have made barely a dent in our debt over the summer, but it hasn't increased, so that's a small win.

As I am a teacher, I had summer off, which was really nice. However, I only had my whole family together for 10 days all summer, 5 of which both of the kids were recovering from having their wisdom teeth pulled. The Boy has learned that he loves farming, so he spent 6 weeks of his summer on my cousin's farm in Oregon. The Daughter attended church camp and a couple of dance conventions and was just generally busy, busy, busy!

We are back to school now, in person, which I love! We have to wear masks all day but it is 100% worth it to have students back in the classroom!

My own children are a junior and senior this year, so I expect the next couple of years to be very busy and expensive! We have already paid for The Boy's senior portraits, letterman jacket, yearbook, prom ticket down payment and ASB card. For the Girl we have paid for powderpuff football, yearbook, prom ticket down payment and ASB card too. Historically we only put $100 a month into our "school" envelope, but in July we started allotting $200 per month, and I'm not sure that's going to be enough. With what we've shelled out, we are already behind and have had to juggle money around to finance everything. I'm hoping we will have a small reprieve and will be able to build our sinking fund back up a bit before we need to shell out more money for things school related.

Two weeks ago I took 9 rings into a jeweler to have them fixed. Some were mine, some were The Girl's, and some were my mom's. Some needed to be sized, some just needed to be soldered together, and some required major repairs like replacing missing stones. That was an expensive trip! $1500 to get them all fixed, but we have been saving money towards getting them all fixed and it actually cost less than we expected and had saved for, so a small win!

The Girl has been invited to be in two weddings in the next year. Two of her older cousins are getting married. As she is only 16, we are paying for all the wedding related expenses.  So far we have bought the bridesmaid dresses for both weddings. We have not yet gotten shoes or jewelry needed. We will have to pay for hair and makeup on the days of the events. (Too bad she isn't older as then she would need to pay for these expenses herself!) We are going to make her purchase a wedding gift for each couple with her own money. (We will also buy a wedding gift from us!)

I think that is most of our major financial updates from over the summer... Hopefully I won't wait 3 months to write again!

Our washer just went out. The bearings on it went out. The last load of laundry I did left our house smelling like smoke so we decided no more laundry in that machine! Our washer was 12 years old and a floor model when we bought it, so I'm not too unhappy with its lifespan, although I would have loved if it had lasted longer.

We bought basically the same model that we had, just upgraded by 12 years. I feel like this new washer is so high tech! It has bluetooth so you can start it from your phone. I told my husband, unless the laundry grows legs and can sort and load itself, I don't need bluetooth on my washer! 

Good news/bad news on the new washer. Good news is we have a savings account for just this type of thing and The Husband earned a lot of overtime that will be showing up on his next paycheck! Bad news is most of his overtime will go to paying for our washer now instead of going towards debt. I'm trying to be positive and remember that at least the washer isn't adding to our debt!

We were totally without a washer for only 5 days but were limping it along for about a week before that. Boy does laundry pile up! Since The Husband got it installed yesterday, it has been going non-stop! 5 people and two pool parties create a lot of laundry!

We paid $699 for washer, on sale. We had to buy a new hose for another $30 and tax brought the total up to about $790. Again, bright side is that we have the money to pay for it! 

I mailed my taxes over the weekend. 

Our taxes were already completed and filed, but we owed taxes to the federal government so decided to wait until they were actually due to mail the payment. We received a refund from the state that exceeded the amount of what we owed to the federal, so overall, we came out on top.

The Husband has been exceedingly busy at work! On his last paycheck, he had over $400 of overtime. He will have close to three times that on his next paycheck. Although I hate how stressed out he has been and how much he has been working, the extra money is nice. Some of it will go into savings (I took money out for taxes, so we were below our savings comfort threshhold), some of it will go to paying random expenses, and the remainder will go towards debt.

May is a busy month for our family! It's my birthday, mother's day, The Daughter's birthday, our anniversary, and the end of the school year. It can get spendy. The Daughter is going to be 16 so we are throwing her a "big" party. It's not actually too big or too expensive (sort of). She is having 11 friends over to swim, watch an outdoor movie, and spend the night. The only part that might be expensive is that we are going to heat the pool. We've lived in this house for 4 years and never heated the pool. I'm a little nervous about the cost. The Daughter loves succulents so I am going to make succulent cupcakes and she is giving out succulents for her favors.  We are borrowing an outdoor projector and movie screen so only have to pay to purchase a movie.

The end of the school year is busy for anyone with kids in school or who are teachers. But man, is it exhausting! I cannot wait to get this school year in the books, and I hope and pray I never see another like it!

Today was payday for both The Husband and myself. I felt very flush for all of 30 minutes until I paid all of our bills and parcelled all the money out to where it needed to go!

I have talked about the way we budget in a previous post. With this payday, we put money into several different envelopes: gas, food, car repair, pet, and Christmas.  We also had to pay a car registration this month. We were "behind" on giving to our church. (This is our choice on how much we want to give every year/month and with an extra paycheck this month, we were able to get "caught up". We usually tithe monthly, but had some unexpected expenses come up the last couple months; and we are glad we are able to donate to our church!)

Due to some large expenses we had made over the last six months, our savings was lower than we are comfortable with. We bought a used truck (paid cash) that we then needed to insure. We also bought a new "garage" fridge. Although we paid cash for both items, we took the money out of our savings. We have been building our savings back up. Because of our refinance, we don't have to make a mortgage payment for the month of May. We took our usual mortgage payment and put it into savings, which brought us back up to the threshhold we are comfortable with.

The husband also had about 10 hours of overtime on this paycheck. All the "extra" money went towards debt. We have some monthly subscriptions that get put on our credit card and those were all paid today as well.

We have a couple of checks waiting to clear and payments waiting to process, but when all is really said and done, we will have parcelled out all the money towards one goal or another! 

I'm happy our bills are paid for the month. I'm happy we were able to get our savings back up to the point where we feel comfortable. And I'm happy to put money towards our debt. All in all, it was a productive 30 minutes! Hahaha! I feel a lot like FocusedinmyForties talks about feeling when they pay bills and then they have to wait around for two weeks until the next payday!

It’s been a couple of months since my last entry and I feel like a lot has gone on! This is probably going to be a long post!

A big part of the reason that I fell off the face of the blogosphere is because we started back hybrid in my district. First of all, as a teacher, it is EXHAUSTING! It’s been a lot but I finally feel like I am starting to get into a rhythm. My kids went back to school two days a week and sports resumed as well. The Boy plays both football and baseball and this year, they were played in the same season and kids could play two sports concurrently, which is not allowed in a “normal” school year. It has made for a crazy schedule. He had 6 hours of practice or games a day and we were attending anywhere from 2-5 games in a given week. We’ve done really well planning dinners through this time and have only bought fast food once. That was a small win for sure! Along with the football and baseball seasons came some costs: pictures, new baseball bag, and some other small (mostly forgotten at this time) purchases. Nothing was too expensive and we had enough money in our “school” or “kids activities” envelopes to cover any costs.

We did make one very costly purchase for school, however: a letterman jacket. The Boy has talked about getting his letterman jacket since he started high school. He would have gotten it last summer or at the beginning of last school year, but due to Covid he didn’t earn a varsity letter. With playing two varsity sports, he earned it this spring. We ordered his jacket, to the tune of $340!!! Ouch! And that doesn’t count the embroidery on the back. We were lucky enough to have enough money in the school envelope to pay for it and still have some money left over for various expenses, including embroidery when the jacket comes in.

We filed out taxes. We have to pay federal and got a refund from state. We have extra taken out for federal and still have to pay every year! It’s very frustrating! We have decided not to readjust our withholdings, however, because the refund from state offsets what we have to pay.

We refinanced our house. We actually refinanced our house about 18 months ago, but the rates are so low right now that it was worth it for us to do it again. We started the process back in January and we didn’t finalize our loan until the middle of April. It was a long process for no reason in particular. Even though it took a long time, we locked our interest rate in back in January. We are happy with our interest rate of 2.7%. We lowered our monthly payment by $200 a month and took a little over a year off of our loan. Unless rates were to drop considerably (which is very unlikely) I don’t see us refinancing again, but I’m very glad we were able to take advantage of the low rates.

Our high schools have elected not to hold prom this year so I thought that was another thing that kids in general, and The Boy in particular, was going to lose out on; but one of his friends since kindergarten is holding a backyard prom. Formal, catered, with a DJ and a photobooth. I’m happy he gets to have that experience. For him we had to rent a tux, buy a corsage, and pay for the tickets at $50 per person. More money. The churches in our city also got together and are holding a city-wide prom for all high schoolers. Our daughter is a sophomore and we didn’t anticipate her going, but she was asked by a junior to attend… more money. We only had to get her a dress and buy her ticket. (Her date was going to purchase her ticket, but because parents need to sign a waiver, he could only buy one ticker and he offered to give us money for hers, (we declined) which we thought was incredibly sweet!) So far, we have been able to cash flow all of these expenses between our clothes, school, and kids activities envelopes so I’m happy we didn’t add to our debt with them!

I'm sure we have had a lot of other financial news during this time, but these are the things that stick out to me!

We had such plans to save money and pay off debt. We still do, but some things have conspired against us.

We have an outside fridge/freezer in our garage. And it's going out. As a family, we go through a lot of milk! We average a gallon a day. We generally buy 10 gallons at a time and that doesn't all fit in our inside fridge, hence the fridge in the garage.

We were given that fridge free over 10 years ago so we more than got "our moneys" worth. Now we need to replace it. For the last two months, The Husband has been filling up 2 liter bottles and freezing them and then rotating them in the fridge to keep it cold. We finally decided to purchase a new fridge.

We found one that is almost the same size as our current fridge. It is less than 1 cubic foot smaller. It is a freezer/fridge combo with the freezer on top (which is our preference). It does not have an ice maker or water dispenser as it is a fridge for our garage and it still cost us $750 plus tax and a $25 fee to take away our old fridge.

It was on sale for President's Day, but was still about $200 more than we wanted to spend. When our old fridge started to go out, we were hoping we could hold out until prices went back down, but we decided to go ahead and buy a fridge as we were too worried that something would happen and the freezer would go out too and then all the food we had out there would spoil.

I am also having car issues. It has a leak (power steering fluid, we think). It also does something funny when shifting gears every once in a while.  I love NOT having a car payment and am not looking forward to having to make one. 

We also recently recieved an "unexpected" (more accurately, forgotten) car insurance bill.  When The Son got his license, we obviously added him to our insurance. They did not bill us right away and told us they will bill us when what we have "prepaid" is up. We pay our policy in full each year, so we forgot we had an extra bill coming. 

Happily we have the money to pay for the fridge and our insurance, but using that money to pay for these things means it doesn't go towards debt. BOO!

Okay, rant over. I just wanted to complain and now I feel a bit better. 

These are a little late in coming. First of all, I couldn't finalize what I wanted my goals to be. Secondly, our world went a little crazy. Lastly, I was procrastinating.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post with some potential goals and those are mostly what I am going to go with for the year.

1. Decrease credit card debt by $8000. I would love to completely pay off my credit card debt but I'm not sure that's going to happen this year. I think an $8000 decrease is doable but will still be work for us. I also want to be realistic.

2. Add $5000 to our EF savings. For various reasons, our EF took a hit this year. I want to get it back up to $10,000 by the end of the year. I found a Pinterest savings challenge that has you save a certain amount each week that ends up being $5000 in a year. I modify it and only do one deposit monthly. I did this last year and it was a great motivator for me. (I know you are supposed to pay yourself first, but I'm not very good at that. However, putting a line item in our budget encouraged me to put more in savings.)

3. Give montly to our church. And increase the amount from 2020 to 2021. (I don't care if we only give $50 more next year, but I want to make sure that number goes up year to year!)

4. Increase my 403b contributions. (We were late getting on the "retirement savings band wagon", so we are trying to make up for lost time. The Husband contributes 16% of his salary (with a 3% match and 6% profit sharing) and I contribute an additional 10% above my CalSTRS requirement.)

5. Split any "found" money evenly between savings and debt. (This could be stimulus money, if The Husband gets overtime, overages pay for me, etc.) Usually this money gets frittered away so I want to give it a purpose.

I know it seems like some of my goals are working against eachother (saving and paying off debt) but we need to do both to improve our financial situation.

I also know most people would say it's more financially sound to pay off debt than it is to save/save for retirement. And while mathematically speaking, that may be true, it does nothing for my peace of mind. So, we are going to split our focus.

We don't have a lof of goals, but successfully completing each one will help put us in a better financial positions than we are in now.

Good luck to everyone on their 2021 goals! And may 2021 be a better year!

As we are getting closer to ending this hellish year and starting fresh with 2021, I have been thinking about what my financial goals should be in the new year.

I know I want to get out of credit card debt.

I know I want to complete a $5000 savings challenge. (This would probably be conucurrent with getting out of debt.)

I know I want to increase my 403b contributions.

I know we want to continue monthly contributions to our church.

But other than that, I don't know what we want to do or accomplish. Even those are vague. We need to sit down and flush out our financial goals. We can't achieve them if we don't define them.

Goals are always so hard for me because I feel pulled in so many different directions. I want to get out of debt. I want to save for short term goals. I want to save for long term goals. I want to give generously. But there never seems to be enough money to do it all. 

Last year, I had 20 financial goals for 2020. It was too many! We met about 65% (13 out of 20), but it was too much to keep track of and to try to meet them all. This year, I know I want to pare down my goals and focus in on what is the most important to us.

I'm looking forward to seeing everybody's goals and hoping maybe they can inspire mine.

I can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. Time certainly flies during the holiday season.

Not too much has gone on financially in the past month. We are just chugging away.

Our debt has actually stayed pretty stagnant. Most of our debt payment has been divereted to Christmas. However stagnant is better than increasing, but not as good as decreasing.

We had a nice Thanksgiving with family and are looking forward to Christmas.

Because 2020 has been such a difficult year, I was able to persuade my husband to allow me to decorate for Christmas extra early this year! He likes to wait until after Thanksgiving, but to me, the earlier the better! With the exception of our real tree, my house was all decorated by Veteran's day. 

The day after Thanksgiving, we drove up to the mountains and, for the first time in my life, cut down a tree. The daughter really wanted to do that so we did and had a great time. The husband picked out the tree and then the daughter cut it down almost all by herself. It was a great day.

Like many people, Christmas is my FAVORITE time of year. I love the cheer, the happiness, the excitement, and celebrating the birth of our Lord and savior. We decorate our whole house: bedrooms, bathrooms, inside and outside. This year we put up 10 Christmas trees. Every year we have a huge open house style Christmas party where anywhere from 75 -100 people come throughout the day. Due to Covid we are not having it this year and I'm so sad about it. I do believe the sacrifice is totally worth it, but it still breaks my heart. As we are all so busy there are some people I see only once a year at our party. Oh well, hopefully we can have a blowout shindig next year!

I've already talked about the debt we have... and we know how we got ourselves into debt: living above our means. We both make good salaries but we used the excuse of living in an expensive area to spend more than we made. 

For the last couple of years, we've been trying to correct that. To help us budget, we use an envelope system. (This was much easier before Covid when you could actually go to the bank and withdraw cash in any denomination. We have had to modify the way we budget the last several months.) We have several sinking funds where we literally store the cash in an envelope until it's needed.

I have been told before that we have too many envelopes, but we have determined these are the categories that work for us. 

Here they are in no particular order.

     Car Repair - this is almost all things care related: repaires, parts, tires, etc.       It does not include insurance.

     Food - Self explanatory

     Gas - Self explanatory

     Clothes - clothes, underclothes, socks, pajamas, etc.  

     Hair/Self-Care - Hair cuts, (occasional) manicures/pedicures

     Essentials - Things like toilet paper, shampoo/conditioner, deoderant,           cleaning supplies, etc.

     Kids' Activities - Sports and dance expenses

     School - PE uniforms, pictures, yearbooks, field trips, sports fees, ASB             cards, etc.

     Pet - Dog food, shots, vet bills

     Christmas - gifts, food, Christmas tree

We have health insurance through The Husband's work (dental and vision insurance are through my employer) and we set aside a small amount for medical costs in an HSA at the beginning of the year through The Husband's work.

We also have a separate account where money is deposited from each paycheck to cover our yearly car insurance, giving to our church, and some small extras. We do plan for these expenses, but they aren't part of our envelope system.

For the most part, we carry money over month-to-month. Some months we don't need all of the money we put in the envelope and some months we need more than our monthly allottment. This has worked pretty well for us. 

We are still in debt, but since we have been using the envelope system, our debt has decreased and we have done better at managing our money and living within our means.

We also continue to contribute to our retirement. (I know a lot of people are against that when you are in debt, but we feel it's what is right for us.) I will do an entire post about our retirement contributions in the near future.       

Thank you all so much for the warm welcome! I read all your comments, thoughts, and suggestions! They were very appreciated!

I actually wrote this last week and tried posting it several times, but with all the issues the site was having, it got lost somewhere in the interwebs.

After reading some of the comments I was a little concerned that I painted too dire a picture of our financial situation.

Although I HATE our debt, I want to be clear that we are not struggling or living totally paycheck to paycheck (although we have in the past).

We do have savings. In the bank we have 3 months of bare bones expenses: mortgage, utilities, gas, and food. I know conventional wisdom says we should take that money and pay off our credit card debt, but it brings us peace of mind during this crazy time.

The Husband and I have both been very lucky during this pandemic and we have been working the whole time. However, we know that things could change very quickly in this economic climate.  My job is pretty secure. I am a public school teacher, but The Husband works in the private sector and we want to be as prepared as possible for any sort of job loss. That is part of the reason we are trying to get rid of our credit card debt so badly. To clarify, we do not anticipate anything happening to his job, (in fact he was asked to work overtime this weekend) but we want as many of our ducks in a row as possible, just in case.