20 for 2020 September 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 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!

It’s actually been several months since I checked in on my goals… since June I think! Eeeek! I haven’t forgotten about them, I just haven’t blogged. Let’s see where we stand.

 

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

Pass-ish: We are making progress. I would say we are on-track-ish. I don’t know if we will make it to under $10000 by the end of the year, but we did decrease our debt. It’s going in the right direction. The last couple months haven’t seen much progress, but we haven’t increased our debt, so I will call it a win.

 

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 time I checked in on my goals! With quarantining and social distancing, tracking our spending has fallen WAY down the list! 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 are almost done Christmas shopping so I’m feeling optimistic. In August, over a 4 day period, I spent over $800 on Christmas gifts; it was more money than we had in the envelope. I actually had to borrow from our “stimulus” envelope and am paying it back in 4 monthly installments. However, I’m still calling this a win! The bigger 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, March, April, May, June, July, and August. (We barely made August. I didn’t send out tithe until August 31, but it was still in August.) 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. (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 every month 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 met this goal! And continue to add to it! I know our refinance helped but we still met the goal!

9.       Meal plan 8 months out of the year.

Null and void:  Due to a world-wide pandemic, this goal got pushed to the wayside. We have been nothing but home for the last six months so meal planning hasn’t been a priority. I may revisit this goal next year but it all depends on the state of the world, literall.

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. We have also increased our long term savings rates by increasing our retirement contributions.

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!

 

No Spend Update

 

We spent some money last weekend. Not a ton, but probably more than we should have. The only plus side here being that it was all on food. We spent $10 on donuts, definitely an extra, but we did pay for it out of our food budget for the month, so technically allowed.

As it was Labor Day weekend, we had my sister and her family over for swimming and dinner, so we sent The Kids to the grocery store to pick up some stuff. That added another $26,77 to our tally for the month. That leaves us with $285.66 left to spend out of our $500 budget.

We are not in the danger zone quite yet, but we are inching towards it. We will have to be careful of our spending for the rest of the month to ensure that we have a successful No Spend September.

We are over a third of the way through the month, but we are almost through half of our money for the month. I don't know how successful we are going to be, but we are going to track it and see how it all falls out.

Tomorrow actually brings another Costco trip where we need a lot: milk, fruits and vegetables, eggs, chicken... and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. 

If we can have $75 left over after our shopping trip, we have a chance of meeting our budget goals, but only if we are diligent!

No Spend September

 Hi again.

I know it's been a while, but I have been busy. Distance learning is no joke! I went back to school in the beginning of August and our district is requiring us to teach from our classroom. I actually like it as there are way fewer distractions and all my "stuff" is in my room. That being said, I am so tired and so busy! Teaching like this is not what I signed up for and a lot of work! Even though I'm in my 15th year of teaching, it feels like it's my first year and I'm having to create and adapt curriculum like never before.

Okay, rant over.

We are doing our No Spend September challenge again. This is technically year 9, but last year wasn't very successful.

A successful No Spend September is one of my 20 for 2020 financial goals. With the whole pandemic thing, some of my goals have totally fallen by the wayside. However, I'm thinking the pandemic might actually help No Spend September because we can't really go anywhere or do anything, so we don't have a lot of opportunities to spend money.

Just as in years past, we are going to try to only buy food, gas, and bills.

Our normal grocery budget is $600, but for the month of September, we try to only spend $500. I know it's not a big difference, but every bit helps.

Because of the face covering requirements due to Covid-19, I am not doing very much shopping. The Husband does almost all of our grocery shopping now. He is not as "frugal" as I am. In September, I tend to stick to the grocery list and he's a little more loosey-goosey. However, the reality is that we will eat whatever food we buy regardless of how much money we spend so it's won't be a waste.

On the first of the month, The Husband mad a trip to Costco. He spend $177.57, a good chunk of our budget for the first of the month, but he did buy 10 gallons of milk and a bunch of fruits and vegetables so we should be pretty good on those fronts for about 10 days or so.

With the pandemic, we have definitely been eating at more more and being more adventurous in our cooking, which often translates to more expensive; but it has been good. Hopefully, for the month of September we will stay on budget and not have to spend too much money on anything!

Wish us luck!

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!