Tentative Plans

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!

After everything was signed and the notary left, we stayed at the restaurant and ordered some breakfast.   Guess it has been a bit since we’ve eaten out together.  Our bill came to almost $22, and that was before the tip!  Granted, we did also pay for the notary’s coffee, but it still seemed like a lot for a breakfast I could have made so much cheaper at home!  Hubs eats out so much when he is traveling that it didn’t surprise him much at all.  While I did enjoy our leisurely breakfast and had the funds in our grocery envelope, dining out is something that we will continue to avoid while digging out of our debt mess.  I can see why Dave Ramsey says the only time you should see the inside of a restaurant while in baby step two is if you work there!  Lol

Once we were back home, I spent a fair amount of time going over February’s budget and scheduled some payments for next week.  Spoiler alert, we will reach our goal for January.  For the most part, our budget itself doesn’t change all that much.  We will fund our envelopes with the same dollar amounts, pay our usual bills, add to our savings and whatever is left over, goes to the snowball.  With irregular income, we seldom know exactly how much extra we can pay until we get the last check of the month.  Even then, I usually wait until almost the very end of the month to make extra payments just in case something does come up.

As I mentioned yesterday, we will be getting a little money back from this refi, although this was not our intention.  It would have been near impossible with factoring in the payoff to our former lender, the funds in our escrow account, closing costs and what we prepaid to have it work out this way.  The best thing now is to make the most of what we are getting back and tell these funds where to go!

Hubs and I have decided to put an extra $325 into our savings, leaving us just enough to pay off our smallest credit card and the surgeon’s bill.  After they are paid off, we will then attack our next smallest debt which is a credit card with a current balance of $2750.  Thankfully, no interest on that card either which helps tremendously with paying it off.

Now that we have our tentative plan in place, we just need to wait for the checks from the bank.  In the meantime, we will keep pushing forward on our journey to freedom from debt!