Our New Normal

We haven't yet had one "normal" month with our new mortgage and budget, but we are starting to see what some of our bills are going to look like.

Our mortgage, while huge, is not quite as big as we were anticipating. It’s about $175 less than we were anticipating it being. For the first month, we decided to pay the amount that we expected our HELOC to be. We also paid extra on our first mortgage. I don’t know that we will do that going forward.

Our PG&E bill, for only 23 days, of which we were on vacation for half of them, was “only” $278. I say “only” because we were told by people we know who have a pool, to expect utility bills upwards of $800. Our next bill will be our first accurate bill for our utilities so we still aren’t exactly sure where we sit with that. (Our first normal bill came. It was for 32 days, of which we were home for most of them and was to the tune of $308. That’s not as bad as we were expecting and are so glad our house is well insulated.)

I have paid our DirecTV bill TWICE when apparently I didn’t need to. I hadn’t been receiving bills so I just paid what I expected them to be. What I didn’t realize was that our DirecTV bill is now combined with our phone and internet bill (because AT&T bought out DirecTV). Now I need to call DirecTV to get a refund check issued. That’s a pain in the butt, but on the plus side, that means our bills are $65 less than I have been paying the last couple of months.

Overall, many of our bills have actually decreased. Because we moved, many of the companies considered us “new” customers so we were eligible for new customer deals. Our internet bill went down. Our landline phone bill went down. Our DirecTV bill went down. It’s a great trend and I love to see a decrease in bills because that’s not usually the case. Many of these decreases are promotional discounts that will only last 6 or 12 months for example, but we can call customer service when the promotional discounts expire and see what else we might be eligible for.

Unfortunately, as great as the move and new house have been, there is one major drawback: the one thing that really will suffer because of the move is our debt repayment. In order to keep funding our envelopes (sinking funds), we won’t have as much to throw towards debt. In addition, with our increased mortgage, we don’t have a lot of extra money floating around.

We really need to be diligent with our purchases and spending going forward, both to adjust to our new normal and to maximize our debt repayment.

This really is our new normal and we need to get used to it.  There definitely is a price to pay for a new, big, beautiful home. However, our old house was just no longer practical for us and we needed more space. Now we have it and need to deal with the repercussions of that choice.