I have been doing some math this morning. I have “a lot” of
money in my savings account. The vast, vast majority of it is from the proceeds
of the sale of our last house. The proceeds were not enough to put 20% down on
our new home, so we put 10% down and kept the remaining money to make
improvements and to buy needed items for the house.
(When you go from 1100 to 2500+ square feet, 2 bedrooms to
5, and 1 bathroom to 3, you definitely need “stuff”; things like hand soap,
shower rugs, towels, beds, etc. Those things added up for sure. 2 months later
and we are still buying things we needed to make this house a home. And we are
so grateful that we have that money available to us and that we don’t have to
fall further and further into debt to furnish our home!)
However, even before we sold our old house and bought our
new house, we had an emergency fund. It was definitely a baby emergency for
sure! I didn’t have peace of mind with only $1000 in the bank. Due to that, I
found a “savings challenge” created by the blogger at Medium Sized Family. It’s a
non-threatening way to save an additional $1000 in a year, just one week at a
time. Additionally, we add a small pittance of $50 a month to our savings. It’s
not much, but it does at up to $600 a year.
On to the actual numbers:
Savings
account total: $26,061.61*
Emergency
Fund: $2,230.34
Proceeds
from the House: $ 23,831.27
* This number does not include The Kids’ savings accounts.
We owe them money and are slowly working to pay them back as well, but their
balances are not included in our totals. It also does not include our account
where we set aside money for our yearly expenses. $600 per month is deposited
into that account but the balance fluctuates widely so I don’t count that money
as savings.
We are continuing to try to slowly grow our emergency fund.
Ideally, at least until we are out of debt, I would like to have $5000 as an
emergency fund. As of right now, we aren’t even 50% of the way there. But we
are a whole lot closer than we were at this time last year! We are 44% of the
way to our goal of a $5000 emergency fund. I know Dave Ramsey suggests a baby
emergency fund of $1000, but when you are a home owner and you have to commute
to work, and you have 2 kids who participate in extra-curricular activities
$1000 will only go so far if Murphy decides to visit our family or something
like “bad things always happen in 3s” were to happen. The peace of mind is
worth the slightly longer amount of time in debt.
Currently, we have about $2300 in our envelopes, plus the
$2200 in our emergency fund and it’s very tempting to take that money and throw
it all towards our debt. That would actually wipe out literally half of our
credit card debt. But then we would be without an emergency fund and without
sinking funds for the things we need to pay for every month and we would still
be in credit card debt. (Not gonna lie, maybe when that amount is equal to ALL
of our credit card debt, we might just do that!)
Of the $23,000+ left over from the sale of the house, a lot
of that money is earmarked towards different projects in the new house. We have
roof repairs that need to be made to the tune of $3000.
We still need furniture
for several rooms, and the master bathroom needs to be remodeled. (Yes, needs!
There is carpet in the bathroom… enough said!) We also want to get new kitchen
countertops and new flooring, but those are wants. We are hoping that the
$23000 will be enough money to pay for those things when we are ready to do
them and maybe have some money left over.
Going forward, I’m definitely going to keep a running total
of our actual emergency fund versus the amount in our savings. Slow growth is
better than no growth and I need to make sure I don’t dip into our emergency
fund savings to pay for house stuff. Hopefully, it will be a while before those
numbers are even close. We are currently operating at a deficit each month due
to our “new normal” and what we are still buying to furnish the house. We are
hoping to stop bleeding money soon!
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