July 2020 Goals Check-In Part 1

One of my intentions for this year is to check in on my 2020 financial goals monthly! Although I am horrible at finances, one thing I have learned over our last 10 years of debt, is that when I pay better attention to our finances, our finances do better...

I skipped June and am super late on July... no reason, just Covid and life. Blah, blah, blah.

I still believe that if these 20 financial goals are met, we will drastically improve our financial situation by the end of the year! In all honesty, even if only some of these goals are met, we will be in a better place than we were when this year started. Please wish us luck as we try to do better and be better!

1.       Get credit card debt below $10000. This has been a monkey on my back for way too long!

Pass: We are making great progress here! Getting a refund for our plane tickets put $3000 towards this goal. I actually think we might make it!

2.       Track our family spending every other month of the year.

Fail: Quite honestly, life threw us several curve balls in the last month so tracking my spending has been the least of my worries. Exactly the same as last month! With quarantining and social distancing, tracking our spending has fallen WAY down the list! In one sense, we aren’t spending much money, but in another, very real sense, online shopping is no joke! Also, our food budget has ballooned! We have nothing to do all day but sit home and eat or try new recipes! I should be tracking this so I know how much we are spending on food, but I’m afraid to look!

3.       Increase contributions to envelopes and go “cash only”.

Fail-ish: We have actually met 50% of this goal, but because 50% is an F, I’m giving us a failing grade overall. We did increase envelope contributions, but we did not go cash only. We are still not cash only, but we are paying more in cash and charging less. Working on it… Same as last month. However, again, quarantining has lent itself to online shopping by necessity. Groceries and gas we are still using cash, but right now everything else is credit.

4.       Increase Christmas savings.

Pass: We increased from $200 per month to $300 per month. I still don’t know if it’s enough, but it is an increase of 50%. We have already bought several Christmas presents and I’m happy the money was there to use. So far we are on track but it’s early times yet. Yes! Same! We are over half way done with our Christmas shopping and still have some money in the envelope. I’m definitely calling this a win! The real test will be when it gets closer to October and November and we see where we are!

5.       Church Tithing. My goal is to donate $300 EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH.

Pass: So far so good. We donated $300 in January, February, and March, April, May and June! We have already budgeted the money for the rest of the year, but we need to follow through, which is not always our strong suit. Also, because of social distancing and “shelter-in-place” rules, this could become more difficult because we aren’t actually attending church. I haven't sent July in yet, but we have the money. (It’s very important to us to remember to give even amidst all this struggle because the church still has bills that need to be paid, salaries that need to be paid, and community services that they want to provide.)

6.       Pay off car!

PASS: I’m very pleased to say that we paid our last car payment and already received our pink slip! This goal is fully completed and met!

7.       Once The Husband’s car is paid off, put $345 payment into savings each month towards a new car fund.

Pass:  So far, so good. In the couple of months since our last payment, I have made sure to deposit the “car payment” into our savings. We are seeing good growth in our savings account!

8.       Save $5000 above and beyond my “normal savings” or any car savings.

PASS: We have saved OVER $5000 of additional savings! And it's only July! Many things helped us reach this goal: refunds received from refinancing the house, a Pinterest savings challenge, and our tax refund! I am so happy and so proud of reaching this goal! We are going to continue with the savings challenge and putting our "car payment" away every month. With the uncertainty of the world today, we need to keep growing our savings account.

9.       Meal plan 8 months out of the year.

Fail: This is a hard fail, but it doesn't bother me. We didn't fail because we didn't plan, we failed because of the Corona virus. Because we were home all the time, the need to plan our meals is gone.

10.   Assuming I can meet all of the above goals, my last goal would be to increase my savings rate.

Pass: I would actually give us a pass on this because we are putting our regular amount in savings plus working on completing a $5000 challenge, plus we put half of our unexpected money towards savings. Thinking good thoughts on this one!

As I think these posts are only going to get longer as the year progresses, I have decided to split them up into two posts. I will publish them during the same week but even half of them are a lot to get through!

Camp Refund

I have some good news and some bad news.

First, the bad news... due to Covid-19, The Kids church camp was cancelled.

The good news... due to church camp being cancelled, we got a $1200 refund.

Back in December, we paid, in full, for our kids to go to church camp. They would actually be there right now. It was $600 for each kid. Every year, we "plan" for our kids to go to church camp but we have never sent them before. Something always kept us from actually committing: dance, vacation, life, etc.

This year, we actually committed to The Kids to go to church camp and it ends up being a no-go.

I'm very sad that they aren't able to go to camp, but I'm very happy for the bump to our savings!

$1200 will go a long way towards improving our savings after several different things depleted it!

June Debt Update

As you know, life went topsy-turvy for the whole world during this last three+ months! We are very lucky to still have our jobs and full paychecks, but life has been crazy!

This debt update is based on our April update because I didn't get around to doing a May debt update. I’m just being real and trying to be transparent. I do these mid-month because our credit card closes on the 15^th. I can’t wait for the day when we are consumer debt free and I can do our financial savings updates at the beginning of each month and I don’t have to take into account when our debt cycle closes! 

Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, I am happy to say that for the fourth update in a row our overall debt decreased; and in a BIG way! Let's get to the update and then we can look more at the "why"!

Here is our current debt totals:

           $13,577.39 Credit Card at 16.74% interest

      

Our total debt stands at: $13,577.39 YIKES! It’s still a lot of debt. All we can do is just keep plugging away. We dug our hole one shopping trip at a time and all we can do is pay it back one month at a time.

Plus side: we paid off 21% of our debt!!!! We started actively tracking our debt again! Our debt decreased! We paid off $3589.62 of credit card debt; again, that's 21% of our debt total!!!! Although we still owe a lot of money, our debt is the lowest it's been since January, 2018! That's something to celebrate! The fact that we haven’t borrowed any more money from The Kids is still a plus to me. We continue to make progress towards our retirement and to contribute $50 a month to our kids’ bank accounts. We are down to “just” one debt. I know it’s a biggie, but it’s exciting to be down to only one debt!

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 that we are still trying to recover from. 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! It’s actually a little depressing to see how long we have been on this roller coaster called debt freedom. We made some poor choices and have been living in a debt cycle for too long!

How we did it: I want to give full disclosure. This was just not an awesome month. This was not just because it was an "extra" paycheck month (because it was). The majority of what we paid off came from a credit for our vacation airline flights. We booked and paid for our family vacation flight back in February and then Covid-19 hit with a vengeance in March. This past week we were able to cancel our trip for a full refund!!! Hence the huge debt payoff this month! Heck, if we could do that much every month, I would only have 4 months left in debt! If only!

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $13,000 (☹) and keeping it that way. And to actually having a chance to meet our goal of getting our credit card debt under $10000 by the end of the year! (I wasn't sure it was something we would be able to do, but this month really gave us a boost!) I’m also looking forward to staying 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! Even though we have been home, quarantining has been expensive! We have spent SO. MUCH. MONEY on food! I have also bought a lot on Amazon. It’s been dangerous! I have several hundred dollars in a jar that goes towards our credit card balance, but because of Covid-19 the whole going-to-the-bank thing isn't very convenient. But, one of my goals for the next month is to get to the bank and send the money towards our credit card.

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.

I hope your debt freedom journey is smooth, uneventful, and beyond successful!

Refund!

Like I wrote about in this post, we planned our family summer vacation. Not only did we plan it, but we paid for non-refundable airline tickets, too. And then Covid 19 happened.

Many of the places we planned to visit on our trip require a 2-week quarantine or are only in Phase 1 of their opening. We couldn't go to anywhere in the places we planned to travel to... Major bummer!

And our tickets were non-refundable. Major bummer!

In doing research to try to get us a refund or voucher, The Husband came across some "law" that went into effect in April that said if there was a major change in your flight, you could request a refund. Then he did even more research!

Our original flight had one layover and a 5:00 pm arrival time into Ohio. When The Husband was checking our flight times, he saw that we now had two layovers and an 11:55 pm arrival into Ohio. He called the customer service reps at Southwest and they were beyond helpful! They said, due to the change we could have a full refund instead of just a voucher. But they were sure to let us know they were extending the use of the voucher out until September 2022. (Quite honestly, I was just happy that we could even get a voucher. And a voucher that we would be able to use. But I was happier with a full credit!)

We opted to get our money back because we didn't want to have $3000 tied up for an unknown amount of time and in such curious circumstances as we are currently living in.

Now this is where things really get exciting for me! We put the tickets on our credit card (to earn points) but transferred the money from our savings account and paid for them already. When the credit hits our account, it will knock out $3000 of debt!

Of course, we still have a lot of credit card debt... but this will definitely be a step in the right direction!

I'm actually super excited to do my debt update this month because it should be good! There should be a big drop in our debt, and put us so much closer to meeting our goal of being under $10000 of credit card debt by the end of the year.

In many ways, I wish that money could go back in to our savings account, but I'm glad it's going to help our overall financial situation! And the reality is, this is our money working for us! And a refund is better than a "credit" or a voucher!

Please continue to with us luck in our debt journey!

My Email Was Hacked

Oh My Gosh! What a pain this was!

One morning I woke up to a couple emails saying "your account password has been changed". I didn't think anything of it and assumed they were spam. You know, the emails where they get you to click the link and then you really are being hacked?

A couple of days later, I got a similar email from another account. I deleted it as spam. Then about three days later, I got another one, but this is from an account I actually use and had just changed my password about a week prior.

I brought it to The Husband and we got it sorted it out. All secure, new password, no problems.

Then, on the following Sunday, I ordered some stuff from Amazon. Everything went through, no problems. About an hour later, I wanted to check something on my Amazon purchase and I was locked out. My account said I requested 2-factor authentication, which I didn't. I was effectively locked out!

When we called customer service, they proceed to tell me that I requested this and they sent the email to fix the problem. But I wasn't getting any emails. At this point we realized my email had been hacked.

Luckily, Amazon froze my account so no purchases could be made on the card on file and I had to start the very tedious process of changing all my passwords! And they all had to be different! Before this, I was one of those people who only used about 2 or 3 passwords for everything! Once my email was hacked, they just started trying that email combination with that password on "every" shopping website: Amazon, Walmart, Target, Banks, etc.

Luckily for me, with the exception of Amazon, I don't keep credit cards on file with any shopping sites. Otherwise, I imagine, I would have had big charges from Target and Walmart that I didn't make!

I was slowly able to get everything cleared up and all my passwords changed. Although Amazon was very quick to lock my account, they were the most difficult to deal with to get everything cleared up. Eventually, 4 days after we realized for sure my email was hacked, we were able to get everything straightened out. Thankfully, nothing was charged on any of my accounts.

This whole experience sucked, quite honestly! However, the timing of it was very helpful! Being on shelter-in-place gave me the time I needed to sort this whole mess out!

*This has been in my draft folder for 6 weeks. That's when this actually happened. I have been monitoring our credit card and any online accounts very closely and still haven't seen any unknown charges!

Stimulus Check

Like most tax paying Americans, The Husband and I received a stimulus check from the government because of the Corona virus. According to "their" calculations, we made too much money to get the full amount.

All told, we got almost $2400. The Husband and I each got almost $700 and we got $500 per child we have.

Then we had to decide what to do with the money. We decided we had four options:
     Option 1: Transfer the money into savings and sit on it.
     Option 2: Send the entire amount towards our credit card debt.
     Option 3: Hybrid of the above options: X percentage towards debt and X percentage into savings.
     Option 4: Take it all out as cash and have it available at home.

We actually went with Option 4. Although we still have debt, we were very lucky during the entire Shelter-In-Place to not have to worry about money. Both The Husband and I were able to work from home and pull full paychecks. For us, the stimulus money was truly a bonus.

We pulled out the entire stimulus check amount and held it available to us in cash. Banks were closing and we didn't know what was going to happen and we thought it was really important to have some cash on hand.

We still don't have a definite goal for the money, but we have it if we need it. We have decided to use it like a little cash safety net.

I know many people were not as fortunate as us and needed to use that money for food, rent, car payments, electricity, etc. so we don't want to take that money for granted and fritter it away on new clothes or random crap.

We want to make sure and keep that money around as a rainy day fund.

Because rain will come and it's better to walk in it with an umbrella if you can!

How did you use your stimulus check?

A Month?

How has it been a whole month since I posted anything?

You would think because we are sheltering-in-place that I would have plenty of time, but that really has not been the case.

I have several post ideas and drafts to get ready, but time has not allowed for it.

In the last month, I have: finished up school, helped my kids' wrap up their school year, cooked and cleaned until I felt like I couldn't cook or clean anymore, paid bills, ferried kids' around as necessary (including a quick trip to Oregon and home again the next day), discovered a leak in our roof, gotten said leak repaired, done laundry, more laundry, and yet more laundry, and with all that, there hasn't been much time to blog.

Now that my summer break has started, I'm hoping I can blog a little more consistently.

I've been so busy that I only started catching up on all the blogs I read this week. I am weeks and months behind on reading success stories of all my blogger "friends" who have paid off debt and made progress.

Anyway, I just wanted to pop on to say I missed blogging and to give a quick update!