So excited!

So excited!

As a teacher, the last day of the month is payday... so that's today!

I adjusted my 403b contributions this month from $800 to $1000. The difference in my net paycheck was only $140! I love pretax retirement contributions! I feel like it's free money, to the tune of $60!

I am making almost exactly the same amount of money that I was making pre-raise, but now I'm contributing $200 more a month towards retirement!

We didn't start as early as we should have, so now we are playing catch up! It's our goal to get caught up! Every raise, both The Husband's and my own, has gone, and will continue to go, towards retirement until we are maxed out on our yearly contributions!

I estimated my take home pay to be $3400, so my budget was set at that amount. Happily, my paycheck was $3475. I took the extra $75 and sent it towards our credit card debt. It's not much, but every bit counts!

Here's to debt payoff and retirement. Oh yeah, and tax deferment!

Garage Sale Fail

Over the summer we held a garage sale. And it was an EPIC. FAILURE.

All over the PF blogosphere you read about people who have garage sales and the gobs of money they make. PF bloggers talk about how getting rid of your unwanted item and selling them makes for a win-win situation: you get rid of the item and make a little money and it goes to a good home. You won’t be reading about that here.

We live on a fairly busy street and we get a lot of drive-by traffic so we didn’t advertise our sale the way we should have. (To be fair, in the past, we haven’t needed to because of said busy street.) We put up a few signs on the two main streets that cross our street.

We prepared everything the night before. We got things ready to be set out. We dusted old items. We priced items. We cleaned off tables to hold items.

The next morning, we got up early, set up our tables, and proceeded to set up our wares.

We had a good selection of items. We had some clothes, shoes, house ware items, games, toys, small appliances, crafts, and books.

Last year, The Husband’s parents moved and they gave us a lot of their unwanted items to use in our garage sale. Because we are remodeling our kitchen, we also had a ton of kitchen items. And we had a lot of items that we had been collecting for the last year because we knew we wanted to have a garage sale.

I was hoping to make a couple hundred dollars to put towards our debt. But we didn’t, not even close.

We made $39.

All the effort we put into our garage sale was hardly worth it. $39. For our efforts, that works out to about $3 an hour. So not worth it.

At the end of our sale, we packed all our wares straight into the back of the car and dropped it off at Goodwill.

The silver lining of the day was that during our garage sale, The Kids ran a lemonade stand. We have a lemon tree so they used lemons from our tree. They set up a table and had signs. They sold their lemonade for $.75 a cup. People walking by bought some, cars stopped and came back to buy some, cars turned around to buy some, random people just stopped and gave them money. Even though the lemonade cost $.75 per cup, most people that bought it just gave them a dollar and told them to keep the change. Some of their friends made a special trip to our house just to purchase lemonade from them. Those things made the day worth it.

Our kids made more money than us during their sale and when we divided up their money we stuck to our 50-40-10 rule for spending, saving, and tithing that we talked about here.

I’ll be honest, the next time we think about having a garage sale, I’m going to think of that $39 and really have to decide if it’s worth it or if I’d just rather have the tax deduction!

Have you ever had a garage sale? How successful were you?

Unusual Spending For April

Here’s the second installment of my new series…

April is going to be an interesting month, for sure. In addition to unusual general life experiences, we are traveling to Washington D.C. for 10 days, from April 12^th to April 22^nd. We also have a car registration due and the second installment of our property taxes is due in April. The last unusual expense we might have for April is any costs associated with selling our house and/or moving. (This could be wishful thinking, but more on this in a minute.)

Washington D.C. is not going to be a cheap trip. The Husband is travelling to D.C. over spring break for a business trip. The Kids and I are tagging along. We have already paid for our air fare, to the tune of $2000, or $500 each, and our hotel, which ran us $1500. Because The Husband is going for work, some of the cost will be reimbursed. His air fare will be covered as will 4 nights of the hotel. We are currently waiting on a reimbursement of $1100 from his work. We have already paid for mine and The Kids’ plane tickets, that was $1500. We made a $486 payment last week towards the trip and with my next paycheck, on March 31^st, we will pay the remaining balance of our portion of the trip. Then we just have to wait for the deposit from The Husband’s work so we can pay his portion.

Once we get to D.C., we will have to pay for a rental car. The cost of that was just under $500. We will also have to pay for food, Metro tickets, any souvenirs, and the cost of fees or entrance into any attractions we go to. 5 days of The Husband’s food will be covered by his work as it is a business trip for him. As a family, we will take advantage of this by ordering pizza one night and/or eating at family style restaurants.  We are hoping this trip will not add to our credit card debt. It will definitely slow our debt progress down, but the goal is to not increase our debt totals by the time the trip is over. (Although we have debt, we choose not to sacrifice our lifestyle to get out of debt. We are willing to stay in debt longer in order to continue having life experiences and making memories for our kids.)

At the end of the month, we have car registration due on The Husband’s project car. The money for this will come from another account entirely that we use for budgeting purposes, especially our annual expenses.

The second installment of our dreaded property taxes are due in April as well.  That will run as about $1500, but we will pay for that out of our yearly expenses account. The money is already there; it’s just waiting to be paid.

Being that we are gone 1/3 of the month, our unusual expenses seem pretty low. We are continuing to fill our budget envelopes this month, so hopefully nothing too unexpected pops up.

March's Unusual Spending: A Recap

How did we do on anticipating unusual expenses in March? Not too shabby, but not too well, either.

I forgot about football registration; and that was expensive!!! $365 to be exact. On the plus side, my retro check was more than expected so it more than covered the big oops. Without the overage in my retro check, I don’t know how we would have paid for football.

I also forgot about baseball pictures. They ran us $30 after taxes. We did still have $20 in our “kids’ activities” envelope, so only $10 was unfunded. We will continue to fund that envelope as the year progresses. Ideally, there will start to be enough in that envelope that forgotten expenses don’t become budget busters.

I still have $100 in our “hair care” envelope. I had budgeted money for The Boy’s haircut, but he got hot one night at baseball practice and I came home to a boy with a “number 2” all over his head. I will continue to fund this category because I want to give The Girl highlights for her birthday and I don’t think The Boy’s number 2 will last. He will start to grow his hair out and we will need to get it cut monthly again. Lastly, I am in dire need of a haircut so some of the money will go towards that.

I am proud to say that even with hosting family birthdays, we didn’t bust our budget (yet). Food was covered. We also needed to buy napkins and paper plates. We served, as planned, spaghetti with meatballs, salad, and bread. We still have $230 in our food budget to last the remainder of this budget period, which is still almost two weeks. We should be able to last just fine. I’m glad I added an extra $100 to our grocery budget for the month. In and of itself, that $100 was not enough, but we were able to scrimp a little here and save a little there, so it worked out.

The Husband’s birthday was in March and I was able to buy his birthday gift with money pulled from our food category. (His birthday gift, was in fact, food. I spent $75 on food he very specifically asked for.)

Lastly, we had baseball stuff we needed to buy for The Boy. We only had to spend a minimal amount due to the fact that the team is wearing the same color as he wore last year. We also found a great deal on a baseball bag. Last, but not least, we redeemed Amazon gift cards to buy his bat.

Overall, we did well estimating and funding our unusual expenses for March. However, what we forgot was expensive. Luckily, thanks to my retro check being larger than expected, nothing was really a budget buster. But going forward, we need to be better. Hopefully, going forward we will also have better funded envelopes that can cover any oversights.

Major Mishap

We have been dong fairly well on our debt payoff. We have been doing a pretty good job of keeping our expenses down. We've been trying really hard to allocate money towards all our budget categories. We are actually starting to see progress.

And then you know what I go and do yesterday?

I hit a parked car. And not just any parked car. I hit my neighbor's car that was parked outside of his house.

I still don't even know how I did it. Luckily, he was very nice about the whole thing. He was very understanding and kept saying "accidents happen". But I'm still so mad at myself.

At least we have insurance. And we are fully covered. The entire cost of the repairs will be taken care of and all we will have to pay is our deductible. I think our deductible is $200. It's not a huge sum, but it's now $200 that can't go towards paying off debt.

Depending on when the bill comes, it might come right out of our car repair fund, but I'm not really sure.

I know that $200 is not an earth shattering amount, but it's almost like a stupid tax. Because clearly I was stupid.

Bright side: the neighbor was very nice about the whole thing, we have insurance, no one was injured, and we can afford to pay the deductible.

Dark side: it's just a pain and a hassle to deal with, it's going to cost us $200, our insurance premiums might rise, and I have to face the neighbor every day until we move.

This has been a tough couple weeks at school and hitting a parked car is kind of the cherry on top of a crappy couple weeks.

Okay, rant over. Here's to hoping things look up!

March Mini Goal Met

Well, I gave myself a mini goal to meet in March. I wanted to increase my 403b contributions from $800 to $1000. By doing this, my entire raise would be saved for retirement.

And I did it!!!!

I delivered the paper to the district office this week.

Both The Husband and I want to retire comfortably. Actually, it's one of our biggest fears that we won't have enough money to retire on. To that end, we are working on maxing out his 401k and upping my contributions.

Assuming The Husband receives his "usual" raise of 3-4%, once we adjust his contributions accordingly, he should be very near to maxed out. Also, his company increases his 401k contributions by 1% on every year on his workiversary. At that point, his 401k should be maxed out. He is currently contribution 14%. If he gets a 3% raise, we will up his contributions by 2% right away with his work upping his contribution by 1% again in August. He would be contributing 17% of his pretax income to retirement.

I won't be contributing as much; but slowly we will continue to raise my contributions as I receive any raises.

We are really trying to avoid "lifestyle inflation"... well, at least until our retirement plans are maxed out.

The benefits of doing this are twofold. Obviously, the tax deferment and forced retirement savings are one goal. The second benefit is realizing we can live on less, but know that there is more if we need it. It's reassuring to know that we can always stop retirement contributions if needed and have an extra $1500+ of take home pay each month. But it's even more reassuring knowing we don't need to do that and we can continue to contribute!

I was very happy to meet my mini goal. Funnily enough, I think this blog had a lot to do with it. Even though nobody reads this but me, the accountability of putting it out there helped me to follow through!

More Money Than Expected

Well, I finally got my “bonus” check.

And it was more than I expected! That never happens! I estimated my bonus check, which has a onetime 2.5% raise, a $500 classroom supplies reimbursement, and retro pay for our raise that went into effect in January but started in July, to be $2000; and in all honesty, I thought I was estimating a little high. When I finally got the deposit into my checking account, the amount was $3003!!! I am so excited!

I had the money included in my March budget as I knew it was coming. I allocated $50 to savings, $200 to miscellaneous bills, $545 to finish paying our plumbing bill, and the remaining $1205 towards credit card debt. I was able to pay all that and have some extra money left over.

Ideally, I would have been able to send the entire extra thousand dollars to our credit card, but my budget had different ideas. The Boy has decided to play football next year. Registration was yesterday and I did not account for it in my March budget. I tried to think of all our unusual expenses for March here, but I missed that one. And it was expensive! $365 for the season. Ouch. On the plus side, we were able to pay for it with this check without going further into debt or robbing Peter to pay Paul. With the “extra” $1000 I received with this check, we paid $365 to football and the remainder went towards the credit card. This extra money really saved my hide as well as my March budget went. Football was a costly expense to forget. The extra money made it so I didn't have to charge the registration or pull it from different categories in my budget!

Originally, we were expecting to only be able to send $1205 towards the credit card, but we ended up sending a payment of $1835. That’s 50% more than our original plan and that is awesome.

I know it’s only $600 more, but it feels great to send more money than planned, because usually Murphy happens and we aren’t able to send as much as we planned. It’s always hard to remember that baby steps are what actually get you out of debt, not big one-two punches. And I’m in this for the long haul.

I know it’s a stretch, but I’m hoping with this extra money, and our planned payments over the next month, that we might be able to get under the $10000 mark for credit card debt. It’s a long shot, but it motivates me to think that might even be a possibility. I also have a little money, $25, in the jar at home that is allocated towards our credit card and I’m hoping to grow that amount too by the closing date of the credit card. Most of my envelopes carry over, but I’m hoping we will have some grocery money left over in the next couple weeks that can add to the pot. The Husband also told me he has almost 2 ½ hours of overtime coming on his next paycheck. Any amount over his normal pay will also go towards our credit card and our goal to get that number under $10000.

As a teacher, “found money” is very rare. We don’t get bonuses, no overtime, and raises are rare; so when I have the chance to get “extra” money, it’s exciting. It’s fun to budget it and figure out where it can help us the most.

I’m so excited that we are down 2 debts, those two debts totaled $2600. That would have been a great chunk to take out of our credit card debt, but then they would still be hanging over my head. I’m so glad to knock some debts off of our list and start seeing some progress with our debt payoff. It was only today, with my retro check, that we were able to fully payback our plumbing bill.  This money is such a blessing! It’s helping us to get closer and closer to our goal or becoming debt free.

We are working the baby steps. We have an emergency fund that grows ever so slowly each month. We have listed our debts and are starting to knock them out one at a time; 2 down, 4 to go. And we are saving for retirement. We aren’t working on some other long term goals yet, but we’ll get there. I’m so happy that we made progress on 5 of our 6 debts this month. Only one debt went backwards and that won’t happen again. On my next debt update, we will have four remaining debts and they will have all gone down!!!