Debt Payoff Progress

This month's debt payoff will be low and late, that's if I post it at all. (Clearly I decided to post, sort of.)

We were on vacation and didn't get back until after I would normally post our debt progress.

I did not have computer access to do all my banking and to check all our bank accounts. (Yes, I had my phone, but as I've said before, I'm not very tech savvy and I didn't do any blogging or banking on my phone.)

I'm not putting any numbers on this post because the numbers are scary. In all honesty, our credit card balance went up, but it's not a real representation of where we are with our debt because we left on vacation before our billing cycle was up and I had the money to pay for our vacation in my bank account but was waiting to see how much we spent. (Holy run on sentence, Batman!)

We finally received our first mortgage bill and know how much our payment is going to be each month. We also received our first PG&E (utilities) bill and have an estimate of where that's going to fall, too. When we moved, our new mortgage has a first mortgage and a HELOC. The minimum payment on the HELOC is $220 less than our lenders estimated it would be. That is both a blessing and a curse. I'm going to try to pay the amount I expected it to be every month to accelerate payment. (*I also added an extra $300 to the first payment of our first mortgage to speed up payment.) The curse part is: I don't know how long I can keep that up, especially with the holidays right around the corner.

Our new house has a pool and everyone we know with a pool told us to expect utility bills upwards of $800. I was terrified to open our first bill. The bill we received is only for 23 days and we were on vacation for part of that, but we ran the pool pump every day for 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the evening. Our bill was $278. Hopefully, that is close to what it will be monthly, because while that is still is expensive, it's NOT $800!

Our credit card payments are going to decrease as our mortgage has so greatly increased, so I'm afraid progress is going to slow down with our debt repayment, but that was the trade-off of moving.

Progress on our car has been chugging along. It is still 0% interest and thus our lowest priority to pay back.

We have continued to pay our kids back to the tune of $50 a month. Progress there has been very slow, but at least there is progress. Once our credit card debt is finally paid off, the next priority will be our kids.

We do have some money in the bank left over from the sale of the house. We also have our emergency fund. I'm going to start keeping track of our emergency fund on here. As of 7/24/17, we have $2015 in our emergency fund. I want that number to keep gradually rising. It truly is a safety net and it a security blanket on a screen.

Anyway, that's where our debt stands, sort of and I'll post a real debt progress update next month!