Navigating life and finances
Envelope spending totals.Happy February 1. Now with January in the books, I thought I should do a recap of our envelope spending. As I mentioned in another post, we currently have six categories. So, how did we do? Here is the breakdown. [Read more…]
Time to update the numbers! January was indeed quite the month! The highlight, of course, was the refi on our house. Looking at the amortization schedule of our previous 30-year mortgage and now our 15-year, even with rolling in the closing costs, by the end of 2018 we will have paid off more with our new shorter term. Yes, we are paying more each month, but wow! What a difference! I can’t wait to see those numbers drop even faster once we are snowballing the mortgage! [Read more…]
Because when you’re in debt, the best place to go is to work. Today I did a “meet and greet” with a family in need of a part-time caregiver for their child. I heard about the case via a fellow nurse at church. She gave my name and number to the family, and the mother called me yesterday. It is about 4-5 miles from my office job. The child was a preemie and is fed via a j-tube (feeding tube in the midsection of the small intestine for all you non-medical folks!) and is also on oxygen. The child no longer qualifies for nursing care (other than a quick visit from a visiting nurse), but the family feels more comfortable having someone with some medical background taking care of their kiddo than just a regular sitter. Essentially, it is a glorified babysitting job. [Read more…]
Telling our money where to go.Hubs and I are still pinching ourselves that the refi on our house went through. With all of the delays we experienced, we were beginning to have a lot of doubts. My seasonal job created a bit of a headache with verifying employment and why I wasn’t currently working there. Um, it’s a seasonal position! Why was this so hard for them to understand? Another delay was the appraisal. Being that we are so remote, there aren’t a lot of appraisers in our area. Our personal biggest concern was our debt-to-income ratio. I feel like we still have a lot of debt (well, we do!) and wondered how we could ever get approved to go down to a much shorter term. Additionally, our credit scores weren’t as high as they were when we took out the original loan. Anyhow, the refi did go through so I guess this is now just water under the bridge. Now my biggest concern is making sure we are in a good position to keep making those payments! [Read more…]
Are you curious as to what it is? No, we didn’t win the lotto (don’t play), nor have we booked an exotic vacation (no money), nor are we debt free (yet) but what we did do today is HUGE! [Read more…]
Trying to do a better job at keeping track of where our money goes!I’ve always admired those of you who keep track of every penny spent. Although in 2017 I felt we were very good at avoiding unnecessary spending, admittedly, keeping track of every dime spent in every category wasn’t a strong point. I have set out to change that for 2018 by tweaking our cash envelope system and also writing down what I do spend in a small notebook. [Read more…]
Today is a snow day, as will be tomorrow. My boss called me earlier this morning to say she was keeping the office closed. We are currently under a Winter storm warning which is expected to dump over a foot of snow in our area. I won’t deny that I was relieved with her decision to close the office as I wasn’t looking forward to being out on the roads today. Thankfully it shouldn’t hurt my paycheck as I’ll take vacation time to cover the lost hours. [Read more…]
We are making progress!Time for my first mid-month progress update. Having set a defined goal of paying off a minimum of $1500 each month, a mid-monthly update will hopefully give me a much clearer picture of how we are doing. [Read more…]
Some work-related, some self-created, and some of it just life in general! Wow, I can’t believe it is already almost the middle of the month! Where does the time go? In spite of my utter lack of posting over the past few weeks, Hubs and I have stayed on the straight and narrow with our quest to dig out of debt. So, other than keeping our noses to the grindstone, what have we been doing since 2018 rolled in? [Read more…]
Despite the many challenges 2017 brought us, we still made progress!With all of our payments now accounted for, I figured I best slip in one last update for 2017. We drew the final line in the sand just twelve months ago. Hard to believe we have already been at this digging out of debt journey for an entire year! Starting debt was $55,749.69 (ouch, I know!) and finished the year t $46,408.39. Ouch on that final number, too, but dumping $9,341.30 is still quite remarkable considering the year we had. [Read more…]