So excited!

So excited!

As a teacher, the last day of the month is payday... so that's today!

I adjusted my 403b contributions this month from $800 to $1000. The difference in my net paycheck was only $140! I love pretax retirement contributions! I feel like it's free money, to the tune of $60!

I am making almost exactly the same amount of money that I was making pre-raise, but now I'm contributing $200 more a month towards retirement!

We didn't start as early as we should have, so now we are playing catch up! It's our goal to get caught up! Every raise, both The Husband's and my own, has gone, and will continue to go, towards retirement until we are maxed out on our yearly contributions!

I estimated my take home pay to be $3400, so my budget was set at that amount. Happily, my paycheck was $3475. I took the extra $75 and sent it towards our credit card debt. It's not much, but every bit counts!

Here's to debt payoff and retirement. Oh yeah, and tax deferment!

Garage Sale Fail

Over the summer we held a garage sale. And it was an EPIC. FAILURE.

All over the PF blogosphere you read about people who have garage sales and the gobs of money they make. PF bloggers talk about how getting rid of your unwanted item and selling them makes for a win-win situation: you get rid of the item and make a little money and it goes to a good home. You won’t be reading about that here.

We live on a fairly busy street and we get a lot of drive-by traffic so we didn’t advertise our sale the way we should have. (To be fair, in the past, we haven’t needed to because of said busy street.) We put up a few signs on the two main streets that cross our street.

We prepared everything the night before. We got things ready to be set out. We dusted old items. We priced items. We cleaned off tables to hold items.

The next morning, we got up early, set up our tables, and proceeded to set up our wares.

We had a good selection of items. We had some clothes, shoes, house ware items, games, toys, small appliances, crafts, and books.

Last year, The Husband’s parents moved and they gave us a lot of their unwanted items to use in our garage sale. Because we are remodeling our kitchen, we also had a ton of kitchen items. And we had a lot of items that we had been collecting for the last year because we knew we wanted to have a garage sale.

I was hoping to make a couple hundred dollars to put towards our debt. But we didn’t, not even close.

We made $39.

All the effort we put into our garage sale was hardly worth it. $39. For our efforts, that works out to about $3 an hour. So not worth it.

At the end of our sale, we packed all our wares straight into the back of the car and dropped it off at Goodwill.

The silver lining of the day was that during our garage sale, The Kids ran a lemonade stand. We have a lemon tree so they used lemons from our tree. They set up a table and had signs. They sold their lemonade for $.75 a cup. People walking by bought some, cars stopped and came back to buy some, cars turned around to buy some, random people just stopped and gave them money. Even though the lemonade cost $.75 per cup, most people that bought it just gave them a dollar and told them to keep the change. Some of their friends made a special trip to our house just to purchase lemonade from them. Those things made the day worth it.

Our kids made more money than us during their sale and when we divided up their money we stuck to our 50-40-10 rule for spending, saving, and tithing that we talked about here.

I’ll be honest, the next time we think about having a garage sale, I’m going to think of that $39 and really have to decide if it’s worth it or if I’d just rather have the tax deduction!

Have you ever had a garage sale? How successful were you?

Unusual Spending For April

Here’s the second installment of my new series…

April is going to be an interesting month, for sure. In addition to unusual general life experiences, we are traveling to Washington D.C. for 10 days, from April 12^th to April 22^nd. We also have a car registration due and the second installment of our property taxes is due in April. The last unusual expense we might have for April is any costs associated with selling our house and/or moving. (This could be wishful thinking, but more on this in a minute.)

Washington D.C. is not going to be a cheap trip. The Husband is travelling to D.C. over spring break for a business trip. The Kids and I are tagging along. We have already paid for our air fare, to the tune of $2000, or $500 each, and our hotel, which ran us $1500. Because The Husband is going for work, some of the cost will be reimbursed. His air fare will be covered as will 4 nights of the hotel. We are currently waiting on a reimbursement of $1100 from his work. We have already paid for mine and The Kids’ plane tickets, that was $1500. We made a $486 payment last week towards the trip and with my next paycheck, on March 31^st, we will pay the remaining balance of our portion of the trip. Then we just have to wait for the deposit from The Husband’s work so we can pay his portion.

Once we get to D.C., we will have to pay for a rental car. The cost of that was just under $500. We will also have to pay for food, Metro tickets, any souvenirs, and the cost of fees or entrance into any attractions we go to. 5 days of The Husband’s food will be covered by his work as it is a business trip for him. As a family, we will take advantage of this by ordering pizza one night and/or eating at family style restaurants.  We are hoping this trip will not add to our credit card debt. It will definitely slow our debt progress down, but the goal is to not increase our debt totals by the time the trip is over. (Although we have debt, we choose not to sacrifice our lifestyle to get out of debt. We are willing to stay in debt longer in order to continue having life experiences and making memories for our kids.)

At the end of the month, we have car registration due on The Husband’s project car. The money for this will come from another account entirely that we use for budgeting purposes, especially our annual expenses.

The second installment of our dreaded property taxes are due in April as well.  That will run as about $1500, but we will pay for that out of our yearly expenses account. The money is already there; it’s just waiting to be paid.

Being that we are gone 1/3 of the month, our unusual expenses seem pretty low. We are continuing to fill our budget envelopes this month, so hopefully nothing too unexpected pops up.

March's Unusual Spending: A Recap

How did we do on anticipating unusual expenses in March? Not too shabby, but not too well, either.

I forgot about football registration; and that was expensive!!! $365 to be exact. On the plus side, my retro check was more than expected so it more than covered the big oops. Without the overage in my retro check, I don’t know how we would have paid for football.

I also forgot about baseball pictures. They ran us $30 after taxes. We did still have $20 in our “kids’ activities” envelope, so only $10 was unfunded. We will continue to fund that envelope as the year progresses. Ideally, there will start to be enough in that envelope that forgotten expenses don’t become budget busters.

I still have $100 in our “hair care” envelope. I had budgeted money for The Boy’s haircut, but he got hot one night at baseball practice and I came home to a boy with a “number 2” all over his head. I will continue to fund this category because I want to give The Girl highlights for her birthday and I don’t think The Boy’s number 2 will last. He will start to grow his hair out and we will need to get it cut monthly again. Lastly, I am in dire need of a haircut so some of the money will go towards that.

I am proud to say that even with hosting family birthdays, we didn’t bust our budget (yet). Food was covered. We also needed to buy napkins and paper plates. We served, as planned, spaghetti with meatballs, salad, and bread. We still have $230 in our food budget to last the remainder of this budget period, which is still almost two weeks. We should be able to last just fine. I’m glad I added an extra $100 to our grocery budget for the month. In and of itself, that $100 was not enough, but we were able to scrimp a little here and save a little there, so it worked out.

The Husband’s birthday was in March and I was able to buy his birthday gift with money pulled from our food category. (His birthday gift, was in fact, food. I spent $75 on food he very specifically asked for.)

Lastly, we had baseball stuff we needed to buy for The Boy. We only had to spend a minimal amount due to the fact that the team is wearing the same color as he wore last year. We also found a great deal on a baseball bag. Last, but not least, we redeemed Amazon gift cards to buy his bat.

Overall, we did well estimating and funding our unusual expenses for March. However, what we forgot was expensive. Luckily, thanks to my retro check being larger than expected, nothing was really a budget buster. But going forward, we need to be better. Hopefully, going forward we will also have better funded envelopes that can cover any oversights.

Major Mishap

We have been dong fairly well on our debt payoff. We have been doing a pretty good job of keeping our expenses down. We've been trying really hard to allocate money towards all our budget categories. We are actually starting to see progress.

And then you know what I go and do yesterday?

I hit a parked car. And not just any parked car. I hit my neighbor's car that was parked outside of his house.

I still don't even know how I did it. Luckily, he was very nice about the whole thing. He was very understanding and kept saying "accidents happen". But I'm still so mad at myself.

At least we have insurance. And we are fully covered. The entire cost of the repairs will be taken care of and all we will have to pay is our deductible. I think our deductible is $200. It's not a huge sum, but it's now $200 that can't go towards paying off debt.

Depending on when the bill comes, it might come right out of our car repair fund, but I'm not really sure.

I know that $200 is not an earth shattering amount, but it's almost like a stupid tax. Because clearly I was stupid.

Bright side: the neighbor was very nice about the whole thing, we have insurance, no one was injured, and we can afford to pay the deductible.

Dark side: it's just a pain and a hassle to deal with, it's going to cost us $200, our insurance premiums might rise, and I have to face the neighbor every day until we move.

This has been a tough couple weeks at school and hitting a parked car is kind of the cherry on top of a crappy couple weeks.

Okay, rant over. Here's to hoping things look up!

March Mini Goal Met

Well, I gave myself a mini goal to meet in March. I wanted to increase my 403b contributions from $800 to $1000. By doing this, my entire raise would be saved for retirement.

And I did it!!!!

I delivered the paper to the district office this week.

Both The Husband and I want to retire comfortably. Actually, it's one of our biggest fears that we won't have enough money to retire on. To that end, we are working on maxing out his 401k and upping my contributions.

Assuming The Husband receives his "usual" raise of 3-4%, once we adjust his contributions accordingly, he should be very near to maxed out. Also, his company increases his 401k contributions by 1% on every year on his workiversary. At that point, his 401k should be maxed out. He is currently contribution 14%. If he gets a 3% raise, we will up his contributions by 2% right away with his work upping his contribution by 1% again in August. He would be contributing 17% of his pretax income to retirement.

I won't be contributing as much; but slowly we will continue to raise my contributions as I receive any raises.

We are really trying to avoid "lifestyle inflation"... well, at least until our retirement plans are maxed out.

The benefits of doing this are twofold. Obviously, the tax deferment and forced retirement savings are one goal. The second benefit is realizing we can live on less, but know that there is more if we need it. It's reassuring to know that we can always stop retirement contributions if needed and have an extra $1500+ of take home pay each month. But it's even more reassuring knowing we don't need to do that and we can continue to contribute!

I was very happy to meet my mini goal. Funnily enough, I think this blog had a lot to do with it. Even though nobody reads this but me, the accountability of putting it out there helped me to follow through!

More Money Than Expected

Well, I finally got my “bonus” check.

And it was more than I expected! That never happens! I estimated my bonus check, which has a onetime 2.5% raise, a $500 classroom supplies reimbursement, and retro pay for our raise that went into effect in January but started in July, to be $2000; and in all honesty, I thought I was estimating a little high. When I finally got the deposit into my checking account, the amount was $3003!!! I am so excited!

I had the money included in my March budget as I knew it was coming. I allocated $50 to savings, $200 to miscellaneous bills, $545 to finish paying our plumbing bill, and the remaining $1205 towards credit card debt. I was able to pay all that and have some extra money left over.

Ideally, I would have been able to send the entire extra thousand dollars to our credit card, but my budget had different ideas. The Boy has decided to play football next year. Registration was yesterday and I did not account for it in my March budget. I tried to think of all our unusual expenses for March here, but I missed that one. And it was expensive! $365 for the season. Ouch. On the plus side, we were able to pay for it with this check without going further into debt or robbing Peter to pay Paul. With the “extra” $1000 I received with this check, we paid $365 to football and the remainder went towards the credit card. This extra money really saved my hide as well as my March budget went. Football was a costly expense to forget. The extra money made it so I didn't have to charge the registration or pull it from different categories in my budget!

Originally, we were expecting to only be able to send $1205 towards the credit card, but we ended up sending a payment of $1835. That’s 50% more than our original plan and that is awesome.

I know it’s only $600 more, but it feels great to send more money than planned, because usually Murphy happens and we aren’t able to send as much as we planned. It’s always hard to remember that baby steps are what actually get you out of debt, not big one-two punches. And I’m in this for the long haul.

I know it’s a stretch, but I’m hoping with this extra money, and our planned payments over the next month, that we might be able to get under the $10000 mark for credit card debt. It’s a long shot, but it motivates me to think that might even be a possibility. I also have a little money, $25, in the jar at home that is allocated towards our credit card and I’m hoping to grow that amount too by the closing date of the credit card. Most of my envelopes carry over, but I’m hoping we will have some grocery money left over in the next couple weeks that can add to the pot. The Husband also told me he has almost 2 ½ hours of overtime coming on his next paycheck. Any amount over his normal pay will also go towards our credit card and our goal to get that number under $10000.

As a teacher, “found money” is very rare. We don’t get bonuses, no overtime, and raises are rare; so when I have the chance to get “extra” money, it’s exciting. It’s fun to budget it and figure out where it can help us the most.

I’m so excited that we are down 2 debts, those two debts totaled $2600. That would have been a great chunk to take out of our credit card debt, but then they would still be hanging over my head. I’m so glad to knock some debts off of our list and start seeing some progress with our debt payoff. It was only today, with my retro check, that we were able to fully payback our plumbing bill.  This money is such a blessing! It’s helping us to get closer and closer to our goal or becoming debt free.

We are working the baby steps. We have an emergency fund that grows ever so slowly each month. We have listed our debts and are starting to knock them out one at a time; 2 down, 4 to go. And we are saving for retirement. We aren’t working on some other long term goals yet, but we’ll get there. I’m so happy that we made progress on 5 of our 6 debts this month. Only one debt went backwards and that won’t happen again. On my next debt update, we will have four remaining debts and they will have all gone down!!!

March Debt Update

It was a decent month for debt payoff. Unfortunately, our credit card bill rose over the course of the month, but our overall debt decreased. That should be the last time we see a rise in our credit card as now it is the debt we our focusing all our energy on. I know we should stop charging on it altogether, but we haven’t. We are doing a better job of allocating some money into all of our budget categories, at the expense of paying down debt, so we shouldn’t have to charge so much in the future.

We were able to clear our first two debts, so that is something.

We did drop a “decade” in our debt. We went from owing over $30000 to dropping into the $20000s, it’s not much, but it’s something, and it’s a start. Obviously, it will be awhile before we do that again, so I’m going to bask in the success while I can.

As of my last update in February, we owed of $30529.97. 

Here are our debts:

            $13274.99        Credit Card at 14.99% - current minimum payment is $286

            $1400               The Boy (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from him.)

            $1400               The Girl (To pay off our other credit card, we borrowed from her.)

            $12400.25        Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

Our current debt stands at $28475.24.

We paid off $2054.73, or 6.7% of our debt total; that’s even including what we added to our credit card and stupid tax, aka, interest.

We wiped out our first two debts from the last update post, increased the amount of credit card debt we had, but made a little progress on the remaining three debts. Overall, our debt decreased. That is a trend we plan to continue.

I’m super happy we were able to pay back my friend and our plumbing bill from the kitchen remodel. By wiping those out, we have two fewer debts to pay and worry about. Also, every paycheck, one per month for me and two per month for The Husband, we put $50 into savings. We are ever so slowly building our emergency fund and adding money to The Kids’ accounts. At this rate it would take forever to pay them back, but at least we are making strides. Once our credit card debt is cleared out, we will be able to pay them back quickly.

We should see a decrease on our credit card debt by our next debt update. By the time of our next update, I’m hoping to throw nearly $3000 at debt, and more if we have any surplus leftover in our grocery envelopes. Currently, any gas envelope surplus is going to our car repair envelope.  The remaining envelopes; school, kids’ activities, clothes, essentials, and haircare carry over each month. I haven’t decided until how much, but at least a couple of hundred dollars, (HA! Like that will ever happen!).

When planning our April budget, I did try to fund our different budget categories, which has been the problem in the past. I didn’t fund those categories, but the kids still need clothes, hair needs to be cut, and toilet paper needs to be bought. Although by funding these we pay off debt more slowly, it also keeps us from accruing more debt because we have, at least some of, the money we need to buy essentials. Between the months of March and April, we allocated over $1200 to different budget categories, not including food or gas. In all honesty, it’s probably not enough, but at least it’s a start. As we pay off more and more debt, we will be able to fully fund all our envelopes.

I do feel like 6% is a great number, and much better than the increase we had from November to February. If we were able to have 6% gains every month, that would be awesome. But, being realistic here, some months are better than other. The goal right now, is to not increase our debt totals and to keep them going down. My goal is to lower our debt total every month, whether by baby steps or leaps and bounds. 

Mixed Emotions

This was a weird month for debt payoff. Overall, our total debt went down, but the balance on our credit card increased. BLEH!

I’m holding off another week to actually write a debt payoff post with actual numbers because I’m waiting for final numbers on the credit card.

We did payoff a couple of debts, though, and that makes me happy. We completely paid off the debt to our friend who booked the hotels for our trip to Universal Studios in December. (Side note, she took forever to tell me the exact amount. I had to keep bugging her for it.) Also, by the time I write my next debt payoff post, we will have completely paid off our debt to our plumber as well. So far, we have saved $1550 to go towards that bill; we have $550 left to go.

We have also paid back a small amount to each of The Kids. With every paycheck, both mine and The Husband’s, I deposit $50 into savings. I deposit into our savings account with the first paycheck of the month and the once each into The Kids’ accounts with the subsequent paychecks.

Again, I’m happy to have cleared some debts, but unhappy that we still have so much debt. I’m also really bummed that our credit card increased as much as it did. Going forward, once we send the check to pay our plumbing debt, all extra money will start going to pay off our credit card. I’m so happy that we now have 2 fewer debtors to worry about (or will on March 20 when my retro check gets deposited and I can send the last bill) and that we can start to focus all our attention towards our credit card debt.

I’m excited/nervous to see the actual numbers. I’m guessing our credit card increased by around $1000 total, after interest, but I have to wait and see. And I know I will have paid back about $3000 to various other debts, so I’m very impatient to see what my net gain was as far as debt payment goes. It won’t be enough, it never is and never will be until we have achieved a zero balance on our credit card!

Debt sucks! And the worst thing about it is, once you get yourself in debt, it makes it so hard to get out of debt. It’s hard to live life, pay your bills, and pay off debt. But we will get there. It won’t be fast, it won’t be easy, but it will get done.

March Mini Goal

I’m not one for goal setting, per se. I usually set some major financial goals, like get out of debt or save $10000, but I don’t break those down into smaller goals. I just hope that eventually, I will meet those goals.

This month, however, I have a mini-goal I want to meet. This year our union negotiated a small raise. (I do mean small; it doesn’t even keep up with inflation.) I want to adjust my retirement to send my entire raise towards retirement. The raise increased my net paycheck by less than $200, but I want to bump my 403b contribution up by $200. I will then be contributing $1000, pre-tax to my retirement. That is $1000 above and beyond what is taken out of my check by CalSTRS. Even with contributing $1000 a month, I am still miles away from being maxed out in my retirement contributions. Eventually, I’d like to say that I will get there, but I don’t know.

I told The Husband that that is my goal for March; to go down to the District Office, pick up the paper work, fill out said paper work, and then turn it in to our payroll department so that the deductions will start coming out of my check.

I have already had two months’ worth of paychecks with the new amount and I don’t want to get too used to it. Lifestyle inflation is real and I don’t want to become a victim to it. I want to take that money and put it away so that I can retire comfortably. The best thing about investing all this money for our future, is that we ever have a financial hardship, we could always stop contributing if needed. Obviously, the hope is that will never happen, but the reality is that it could.

As long as we can continue to do so, I want to keep upping my 403b contribution amount. The Husband’s 401K should be maxed out in August of this year. At that point, any raises he receives will start to change my 403b contributions. Even upping my contributions to $1000 a month, I am a long way from being maxed out. I am, however, making good progress.

Anyway, that's my goal; to actually switch my contributions by the end of this month, so I have 2 weeks. 2 busy weeks between soccer, baseball, dance, work, selling our house (and looking at new houses), and life, but hopefully I do it!

Here's to goals.

Thankful

For Christmas, The Husband bought me a Steph Curry tee shirt and he attached a post-it note to the tag telling me I also got tickets to one, or more, games of my choosing. Fast forward a couple of months and we have a friend who is a Warriors season ticket holder and he had a game he couldn't go to and knew we wanted to buy a game. He offered to sell them to us and we said yes.

Now, this is a friend since high school who we don't get to see very often any more. Same reasons as everybody else; lives are busy, kids, sports, work, etc. In order to pick up and pay for the tickets we arranged to go to their house for lunch and to catch up. He smoked meat and made potato salad and we brought pasta salad. It was a really nice visit.

At the end of the lunch, I asked them if a check was okay or if they would rather have cash... and they would't let us pay for it. They gave us a pair of tickets for free. It was so kind and really, overly generous, but we appreciate it so much! The season tickets also come with parking so we got that too. He also gave us a tee shirt that was shot out of the tee shirt cannons at the game.

We have debt, we are trying to sell our house, we have kids; it was such a blessing that they gave us the tickets for free! I was feeling very guilty about buying the seats because we couldn't exactly afford them, but I'm not going to lie or sugarcoat it, I really wanted to go. Now, I can attend the game without feeling guilty about spending the money or thinking about what I should have spent the money on.

Thank you, sweet friends, for making this brunette's day!

Tidbits

In my unusual expenses for March, I talked about needing to buy baseball stuff for The Boy and I’m happy to report, I didn’t have to buy nearly as much as I thought I would. His team is going with grey pants, navy socks, and a navy belt; all things he had from his team last year. I was, and am, so happy! He also needed a new bat as he continues to grow like a week. The Husband redeemed some Amazon gift cards and we only had to pay a little more than $3 out of pocket for his bat. The total price was just over $100. Because of the gift cards, I feel like it was free. I know it wasn’t but, psychologically, it feels like it was. The only thing we had to pay for out of pocket were his baseball cleats. We bought those yesterday at a cost of $59.39 after tax, not too bad. I budgeted money for “kids activities” in our next pay period, so I charged the cleats, but will pay that amount when The Husband’s paycheck comes through on Friday.

I’m also so happy that it looks like we are going to stay within our grocery budget this pay period; we haven’t done that in quite a while. As of right now, we have $6 of grocery money left. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but having anything left means we stayed in budget. Yesterday, we went grocery shopping, after first meal planning, and bought everything we will need for the rest of the week. We bought fruits and vegetables, several boxes of tea, and the ingredients we needed to complete our meals. And I still had $6 left over! I also started buying the food for the family party we are hosting at the end of the month. I bought a bag of meatballs and some parmesan cheese. I still have a lot to buy, but I padded my grocery money this month to compensate, so I should be good!

I took my kids down to Universal Studios this weekend, (we have annual passes and we had a $100 hotel credit). The exciting tidbit here, is that even with driving all the way down to Universal Studios and back, I will also stay within my gas budget for this pay period. I actually charged my gas, but as soon as I got home, I took that amount of money out of my gas envelope and plopped it in a jar with a post-it note to remind me it goes directly towards the credit card. I still have $40 in the gas envelope. I will need to fill up this week as my tank is nearly empty so I won’t carry any gas money over, however, The Husband might. For the foreseeable future, leftover gas money will go into the “car repair” envelope until it’s up to about $1000, then I will reassess and decide if I want to change how I allocate the leftover gas money.

Nothing too earth shattering here, but a few things I wanted to blog about since major victories are made up of minor victories.

Debt Happenings

This morning when I opened up our online banking, we had a deposit of $15000. Our 401K loan has been processed, approved, and deposited into our account. I am both happy and sad about this. Happy because we had a 401K loan to borrow from; happy because we now have some money in the bank to work on home repairs, happy because we are one step closer to putting our house on the market and buying a new home. I’m sad because it’s more debt; sad because we didn’t have any savings to work with in the first place; sad because, even nearing middle age, we can’t get our finances together.

This money does give me something to work with, though. This money is being used for home repairs to help make our house ready to sell and as possible good faith/down payment money. I was able to go into our accounts this morning and transfer back the money into savings that I had to use the other day because of The Husband’s time card snafu. That will all get corrected when he receives his check next week and we deposit into our checking account.

Like I said, this money gave me something to work with. It made me sit down and revisit my February and March numbers. There wasn’t much change as far as February goes because the month is nearly over. But I did add a line item for paying my friend back that wasn’t there before. I will be paying her back with the last paycheck of the month. Then I will be one debt down and 37 or so to go.

As I was going over my budget for March, our debt repayment was looking pretty lean. Then I really studied the numbers and I saw that we were paying back a lot of debt… just not a lot towards the credit card. We will pay back our friend who booked a hotel for us. We will be paying back our entire plumbing bill, at almost $2000, $1800 towards our credit card, and $345 towards our car payment. I wish I could allocate all the money towards our credit card bill, but realistically, I have other bills to take care of and by paying the plumbing bill next month, that’s one more creditor I will be able to knock off the list.

Next month should be a pretty good month for debt payoff. Of course, until the debt is gone, it will never be enough, but after any purchases and interest, we should still knock out about $2000 worth of debt. At least that’s how much I’m hoping we can eliminate.

It’s so funny, that 401K loan is burning a hole in my pocket. I see that money sitting in my account and think, “that’s enough to wipe out our credit card debt and start paying the kids back”. Then I have to take a step back and remember that then we won’t have the money to do any home repairs or good faith money to put an offer on a home. We also want to pay that money back as soon as possible. Whatever we don’t use for its intended purposes, we plan to put a lump sum payment back towards the 401K. Patience, Prudence.

I know slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes I sure wish there was a magic fix for our stupidity!