The No-Spend September that wasn’t…

This was an interesting month for sure! For the past seven years, our family has done a “No-Spend September”. You can read about some previous years and installments here, here, or here, just to get an idea of what we do and why we do it.

We planned to do it again this year, but were unsuccessful for so many reasons: my dad’s illness, The Boy lost some football equipment, unexpected company over for dinner, an unexpected potluck we needed to bring something for. Quite honestly, the list of reasons and excuses could go on and on.

We went into No-Spend September with the best of intentions, however we didn’t PLAN for it. In years passed we have meal planned and wrote down schedules. We knew what days we needed to use the slow cooker, what days needed to be “quick” dinners, and what days we had extra time. We made sure The Kids were bringing their lunches to school every day. We planned. This year we fell into the category of “failing to plan was planning to fail.

During No-Spend September, we usually set a grocery budget $100 less than are normal monthly grocery budget of $600, so it would have been set at $500. We also really try to check our gas consumption. We don’t buy convenience food. We don’t buy clothes or shoes. We don’t buy toiletries or the like at Target. We really curb our spending and send all extra monies toward debt.

This year we were beyond unsuccessful. We had so many different mishaps we needed to take care of throughout the month. This was by far our least successful No-Spend September. And it hurt.

We definitely curbed our spending and were actually able to send a good chunk of change towards our credit card debt, to the tune of almost $2500 this month alone, but if we had been more diligent with our planning and in our spending, we could have paid off even more this month!

Next year, we will try again. We should be in a less precarious family situation and be better able to plan.

This month wasn’t all bad, but I guess the tough part is that it wasn’t all good. We did make progress on our debt. We actually made pretty good progress on our debt, but I can’t help thinking how much we could have paid off if we had really had a No-Spend September.

2019 Financial Goals Check-In

Let me start by saying, I really DON’T want to do this.  I haven’t checked in with my goals since the since February. At that point we were only 8 weeks into the year. Since then, things went sideways in a major way and our finances became an afterthought. I’m dreading seeing what progress we haven’t made on our goals.

To recap, my 2019 goals are pretty basic and all include improving our financial situation.

I came up with 6 financial goals I wanted to meet in 2019. Some are repeats, some are new, but I feel they are all realistic. (I wrote this line originally before my dad’s cancer diagnosis and understanding how that would change our lives.)

2019 Goals

·                  Decrease debt/no new debt

·                  Pay kids back (including interest)

·                  Pay off car by 12/31/2019 (about 2-3 months early)

·                  Credit card debt under $10000

·                  Save/budget for Christmas

·                  Stick to cash only budget

Goal 1: Decrease debt/no new debt PASS

So far, so good. We haven’t added any new debts and from our last 2018 debt update to now, we have decreased our total debt by $6673.41 and all things considered, I feel pretty good about that! We still have a lot to do and a lot of progress to catch up on, but our debt is trending the right way.

Even with minimal attention paid to our finances, we have made progress towards paying off our debt and I feel happy about that.

Goal 2: Pay kids back (including interest) PASS

So happy to report that we paid our kids back in full and with interest! Even after they were paid off, we have continued to add $50 a month to their accounts. It’s not much, but it’s something!

And they are no longer a debt!!!

Goal 3: Pay off car by 12/31/2019 NOT ON TRACK

We are not on track to be successful with this goal, and I think that’s okay. We pay interest on our credit cards so we send any extra money towards that debt and are not focusing on paying off our car early. Not long after my original goal check-in in February, I decided against this goal. I decided it was more important to focus on paying our credit cards down because of the interest, so although we are not on track with this goal, I feel okay about it.

Goal 4: Credit card debt under $10000 NOT ON TRACK

Overall, we have decreased our credit card debt by almost $3000.00, $2933.41 exactly. I’m glad we have made progress, but we are not on track to be under $10,000 by the end of the year. We have a little over 3 months remaining, and I plan to make progress, but realistically, it would be super difficult to get under $10,000 by then.

At this point, I’m hoping we can keep making progress and keep decreasing our debt. I’m not going to give up on this goal, but I’m not going to beat myself up if we don’t meet it.

In order to meet this goal, we would need to pay off just over $2000 per month, plus interest. I don’t see it happening. But I do see progress continuing to be made.

Goal 5: Save/budget for Christmas PASS

This goal has been going great! Every month I have faithfully put $200 into our Christmas envelope and we have had the money there to use as needed. I have loved having some money set aside to use for Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers. I seriously don’t know why I didn’t start doing this sooner.

The Husband has also redeemed $200 in Amazon gift cards from his works employee incentive program that he has used towards Christmas presents.

Lastly, we have almost $400 in points from our credit card that we are going to redeem. These will be used for Christmas as needed. I’m planning to use this money to buy our Christmas party invitations and for food for our party. Again, it won’t cover it all, but it will be a good start.

Goal 6: Stick to a cash only budget NOT ON TRACK

Although I am not “passing” this goal, I also feel like I am not completely failing at it either. Overall, I am using cash and funding my budget envelopes, but I have had a couple of slip-ups. Several times I have opted to use my debit card (from one of two different banks) and I think that’s good because whatever I’m buying is actually paid for.

Since I recently got back on the get-out-of-debt wagon, I have tried really hard to make sure I have the money to pay for anything that has been charged. For example, The Boy just needed something for football and although we charged the item, I immediately took the money out of our “kids’ activities” envelope and put a post-it note on it to send it to the credit card. It’s not ideal and we still have a long way to go, but it’s progress.

Overall, I would give myself a B- for my financial goals for 2019. With the chaos of our life over the last three months, I’m not totally unhappy with where I’m at and feel like I am making strides towards our financial freedom.

Feeling Optimistic

I’m feeling optimistic about our debt.

I don’t know why. Nothing has changed. No windfalls to put towards our debt.

Just steady progress and a feeling of hope.

Because life went sideways for a while, our debt journey was no longer a priority. I stopped tracking our debt. I stopped strictly following our budget. I “bounced” three (three!) checks. (They didn’t actually bounce as our bank covered the check for us, at a fee of $36 each! It was entirely my fault, I was just not in a place of caring where we were financially.)

I am feeling reinvigorated to get out of debt. Although we still owe a ton of money, I see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

Our credit card debt is the lowest it has been in 18 months and going down. We still owe $16,000 to our credit card, but we are making definite downward progress! In just a couple of months, we will have the lowest credit card debt that we have had in three years. It will be a milestone month for sure! I’m not counting my chickens, I’m just looking ahead to where we are going and where we will be soon.

In February 2016 we were still living in our old house and had just finished a kitchen remodel. We had over $13,000 of credit card debt and for several years, the outlook only got worse. Moving was very expensive and although our bills and obligations increased, we never changed out lifestyle. We continued to live “high on the hog” and didn’t adjust for an increase in our cost of living. Now, we are more comfortable with our monthly obligations and what we need to do.  I feel like we can get out of debt. We can be diligent with our finances.

The Husband came to me one year ago with a plan to get out of debt. It didn’t work out the way we would have liked, but in that one year, we have paid off $5600 worth of credit card debt, continued to make progress on our car loan, and made many “big” purchases. Our debt is down by over $5000 and it will keep going down. Even with purchases that we made: computer, phone, jewelry… we were able to make progress. We are going to continue making progress and we are going to get out of debt.

I feel rejuvenated and ready to get out of debt. I don’t know why or what it is, but I’m all in. Progress is the biggest motivator! We had a good month last month. I didn’t have a “monthly debt update” to compare it to, but I had my totals from the previous month. We paid of 11.5% of our debt in one month. I know that’s not a normal month and certainly not sustainable, but it is repeatable. It was also great to see those numbers in black and white and to know that we did that. We made that progress. Each month, we are going to owe less and less debt and eventually we will be able to payoff 10+% of our debt every month!

We will get there! We will get out of debt!

I found my motivation: progress. What’s yours?

Quick Post

This is going to be just a quick post…

I plan to do a debt update in just a couple of days. I think it might be slightly more positive than I expected. (Thank God for No-Spend September!)

My life has been crazy and debt payoff has not been a priority, but I still want to see the small blessings I see.

Recently, we bought tickets to a show for a group of 12 people. I commented to two of them that they owed me money. Both said I was wrong and they didn’t owe me anything. (They were not being rude or mean about it. They truly didn’t know.) Then their husbands stepped in and said, yes, we do. They paid me on the spot. That was unexpected and I was able to send the money right to our credit card.

I have also bought a lot of stuff for my mom recently. She is so busy caring for my dad right now that she doesn’t get out much. I love my mom but she usually takes months to pay me back. She paid me back everything she owed me within two weeks of my buying it and I was able to send the money straight to the credit card.

As it is September and inching closer to Christmas, I have found my “Christmas” envelope so helpful! It has never held more than about $600 at a time because as money goes in, money comes out. But, it has been so wonderful to be able to pay for things using the envelope. I don’t know why it took me nearly 40 years to plan for Christmas but I’m so glad I did and I will never go back to the old way! I love having a Christmas budget and having money to pay for the things we need to buy!

I feel like God has really blessed us the last week. Because it is No-Spend September, we were able to make a little progress on our credit card bill this month. Between being paid back a lot of the money we were owed and our payments we made a pretty good dent, but I knew I wanted to pay more, but I had no more funds coming in. I even thought about transferring money from our savings account but had to stop myself.  Fast forward a couple of days and I logged into my bank account and had more money than I expected, (which is always nice!). I received an “extra” paycheck from a day I worked last month that I forgot about! YAY!!!! $170 straight to the credit card! Then, we had to donate a car as it was breaking down more often than it worked, (☹, it was the first new car I ever bought and almost 17 years old. It was a great car!), when The Husband called to have it taken off of the insurance, they said we would be getting a refund check fro $298. It went straight to the credit card! Lastly, I had some returns that I needed to take back and I finally did that for another $49.

Each day when I pray, I pray to God about improving our financial situation and getting out of debt. I pray for wisdom and restraint with our finances. This last week I have tried and tried to figure out a way to come up with more money to give us a chance to bring our credit card bill under $16,000 when it closes. I had exhausted all the avenues I could think of and then God gave us a $515 swing in our finances! In just two days! It’s still going to be really close to see where our credit card actually closes at after interest, but because of these blessings, we have a chance of our balance being below $16,000. That will be the least money we have owed in credit card debt in about 18 months!

These are all small wins but added together made for some good financial progress!

Wow, this post ended up being longer, and more detailed, than I expected it to be!

Have you had any wins lately?

Debt Update September

This is my first debt update since March! EEEEKKKK! Unfortunately, things haven’t changed nearly as much as I would have liked, but on the plus side, we do have less debt than we did then. After this update, our debt increased. We made some big and unplanned purchases that we put on credit. Some of them were necessary and some of them were not, but they were all expensive.

We had a crazy summer and have been slowly digging our way out.

This debt update will be based on our current totals. I will compare our current credit card to debt to our last month’s statement. I will include our car loan. We do have a couple of other debts that I don’t really talk about here. We have a 401K loan on my husband’s account that we took out 2 ½ years ago when we planned to move. We also have a 10 year loan for our solar that we are only one year into paying. I probably should include these, but for whatever reason I don’t.

For various and sundry reasons, we still have a ton of credit card debt. But, (for the millionth time we are starting again!) we are going to get out of credit card debt. We are going to keep decreasing our credit card balance until it reaches $0! Even though we are mired in debt, at least our car loan has continued to decrease. We have a 0% loan so it’s nice to see the payment actually affect the bottom line; to that end, I don’t really focus on paying extra towards our car payment because it’s at 0% interest. I know that goes against what Dave Ramsey teaches, but I can’t see paying more interest on my credit card balance just to get an interest free loan paid off quicker.

Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, I am happy to say that for the first month in a row, (hahaha) our overall debt decreased! (I am so happy to get to be writing that instead of having to say that our debt went up! Quite honestly, we kind of took a blogging and debt update hiatus when our debt was increasing, and not because it was increasing, life just went sideways!) Usually we are not making giant leaps and bounds in our debt repayment, but believe that slow and steady wins the race, but last month was actually pretty good as far as debt progress goes.

Our last credit card statement had a balance of $17,887.61. Being real here, it wasn’t pretty.  

Here are our current debt totals:

            $16,020.28     Credit Card at 16.74% interest

            $1990.00         Car Loan at 0% interest    

      

Our total debt stands at: $18,010.28. YIKES! I can still hardly wrap my head around that number, but at least we are finally under $20,000 in debt. It’s still a lot, but I’m a little sad that falling under the $20,000 mark happened without any fanfare. In fact, in all the craziness of our life, I didn’t even realize we had gotten below that number until I was writing this debt update. That’s just another reason that I think keeping this blog is so important. It keeps me aware and accountable!

Plus side: we started actively tracking our debt again! Our debt decreased! We paid off almost $1867.33 of credit card debt in actual dollars, plus another $345 towards our car, which amounted to about *11.5% of our total debt. With our last payment, we dropped another thousand on our car loan! The fact that we haven’t borrowed any more money from The Kids is a plus. We continue to make progress towards our retirement and to contribute $50 a month to our kids’ bank accounts.

*We actually had a great month for debt payoff! 11.5% is nothing to sneeze at! If we could do that every month, our debt would be gone in 9 months. If only… However, I’m pretty excited to see we had double digit decreases and am hoping to have another good month next month. We had some unexpected “windfalls” of money that helped get us here: a car insurance refund, an expected, but forgotten, small extra paycheck, some returns, and of course, No-Spend September. All-in-all, a pretty good month.

Down side: No matter how much debt we pay off, it’s never enough. We also had a few months of backsliding and not keeping track of where we were. L Also, we did still charge on our credit card. Of course I also hate that several hundreds of dollars went towards interest on our credit instead of towards the principal.

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $16,000 and keeping it that way, also making continued progress on our car loan. I’m also looking forward to getting back on the debt pay-off and blogging band wagon! I was off of it for too long and it feels good to be making progress again! If we truly have an exceptional month of debt payoff, we could potentially skip the $15K range altogether and barely break into the $14K range. Honestly, that will be a stretch, but it won’t be impossible. I’m also hoping that with our next debt update, we can totally skip the $17K range and fall into the $16K range. Again, that is a stretch, but not totally unrealistic. Wish us luck!

Clearly, I’m not in an ideal situation. But if I have to get out of debt one baby step at a time, I can do that.

WOW! Another long post!  If you stayed around until the end, thank you! If you got bored and moved on, I totally understand.

I'm Back... Again

Well, hello there. Remember me? Brunette Getting Out of Debt? I’m back…

All I can say is it’s been a doozy of a summer over here! Very early in my summer break, my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Let’s just say that threw everything for a loop! Vacation plans, kids’ schedules, paying down debt, it all flew out the window and my summer was dedicated to helping my parents as much as I could in any way I could. My parents live about 30 minutes away from us and I was going out to their house to help them about 6 days a week. I would spend a couple of hours in traffic each day and anywhere from 6 – 8 hours at their house doing various chores for them or just keeping them company. Obviously, that left very little time for blogging.

Now that we are back in school, it brings routine back into my life. I have a regular lunch time where I can sit and jot a few lines. I have some dedicated time to pay bills and add up our debt (which, by the way, I really don’t want to do… I think we backslid over the last few months and I don’t think I want to see the results). Although because of work I become busier, I have specific time set aside to do things.

I’m hoping to get back into blogging. It probably won’t be consistent, and I don’t know how long or detailed my posts will be. But I want to get back to it and I want to feel accountable again. I want to get out of debt and I want to chronicle my journey.

The last few months we have made several large purchases that we didn’t plan for: a new phone (for me, because we gave The Daughter our old one), a new computer (because as The Husband put it, “ours was giving us the black screen of death”) a new ring (for our anniversary), concert and show tickets, the list goes on and on. Some of our purchases were necessary while other were completely frivolous and worse yet, we didn’t plan for those purchases so we put them on our credit card.

Our credit card balance had gone up since our last debt update and has almost sat stagnant over the last two statements. We have made payments, but we have charged so much that the payments have made a negligible difference in the actual balance.

BLEH! I’m so sick of debt! And the cycle I perpetuate to keep us in it!

BLEH! Hopefully my next post isn’t 3+ months away and hopefully it will be a little more positive!