Money In and Money Out

Until a recent conversation with The Husband, I didn’t realize how much money was outstanding that is owed to us.

I saw a charge for $100 on our credit card (made by The Husband) that I asked him about. He told me that was for a ticket change we had to make with our season tickets to the theater and that because we had to change from a Friday night to a Saturday night, there was an upcharge of $25 per ticket… so my sister and her husband owe us $50 for that.

We also bought tickets for a Christmas show at a smaller local theater for ourselves and two other couples. Each pair of tickets was $153. There is another $306 that is owed to us. (This was charged over a month ago because it was apparently from our last billing period.) I’m hoping when we see my brother this weekend, he will have the money for us, from both him and his wife and their friends that we are going with.

Throughout the year, my mom and I are constantly owing each other money. She’ll buy something for me, then I’ll buy something for her and so on and so forth.  Our current total was her owing me $81. She paid me back this weekend.

Due to my bank debacle, I have $100 extra dollars in my bank account. I am going to take the $81 she gave me and put it in my car repair envelope and then send the extra money in my checking account to the credit card.

As soon as we are paid back for those tickets, I will send that money, all $306, straight to the credit card!

I’m also expecting a credit from our Japan trip. I don’t have any idea how much that will be, but whatever the total is per person, I get two times that as both my son and myself went. None of this money will be spent. I will put the entire amount into our savings account/emergency fund to top it off and get it back to $10000. (Also, I’m hoping The Daughter applies to go so any money we have left from our trip I plan to rollover to help pay for her trip.)

We do still owe my best friend money from our Japan trip. She paid for the full amount of the hotel room and some random souvenirs. I need to total that up and pay her back. Once I figure out the amount, I can budget for it in our monthly budget.

Baby steps and spoonfuls at a time. We will get out of debt!

A Small, Exciting To Me, Update!

So this month is September… in our family, we do a No-Spend September, where we only try to spend money on food, gas, and bills. We don’t buy Starbucks. We don’t go out to eat. We don’t buy new clothes or shoes. We don’t get haircuts.

Because of all this, we save any gift cards we do have for September. Usually we can go to a movie or two with gift cards. We can usually have one meal out and I usually have a free drink saved up for Starbucks. We don’t cheat and we don’t spend any of our own money.

This year, I had 3 drinks saved for Starbucks; 2 free ones and a $5 gift card that my sweet friend gave me. I was pretty excited to start September off with 3 drinks! (I have since used one.)

But… this week I attended a baby shower of a friend I’ve known for 20 years. And I won two games! One game was a baby word unscramble and the other game was when you can’t say the word “baby”. The prize for each game was a $10 Starbucks gift card and a nice bar of chocolate!

I was so happy for the Starbucks gift cards. That brought my total number of drinks for the month up to 7! That I wouldn’t be paying for! Now, I never drink 7 Starbucks in a month so I’m not going to start now!

I will take one of the gift cards and add it to my Starbucks totals so that I could have up to 5 drinks this month; but I have plans for the other one…

Let’s just say that card will make my Christmas cost $10 less!

Another Extra Payment

YEAH! I made another credit card payment!

Our minimum payment due this month is $496. Today, I sent $357 towards my credit card. We still have 3 paydays until our next minimum payment is due so $357 is a good start!

This past weekend, we saw family who owed us money. I had a sister and her husband who owed us $50 and a brother and his wife who owed us $307. Both siblings owed us for tickets to different shows we are seeing.

I took the money we were given and deposited in the bank right away so I could make the payment as soon as possible!

I’m so glad we sent all the money right to the credit card!

It wasn’t a huge payment, but an extra $357 over and above the minimum payment each month means we are that much closer to getting out of debt!

Small Extra Payments

As always, we didn’t pay off as much debt as I would have liked.

At this point, I’m actually just speculating because I only know, about, what my credit card balance is going to be. Needless to say, it didn’t go down enough! I do know that the balance will be less than last month’s, so regardless of the total we did make progress.

Near the end of our billing cycle I was able to make some extra payments I wasn’t totally anticipating. And boy am I glad I was because without those extra payments, I wouldn’t have made any progress at all on our debt; we would have just broken even.

I received a small extra paycheck this month, which was awesome because I wasn’t sure when I was going to get that check. I sent that entire check $188 to the credit card and I actually rounded it up to $200.  I also overestimated a couple of our other bills to the tune of $16. I know that isn’t much, but right now, every little bit helps. So I was able to send an extra payment of $216.

My mom also paid me back $81 that she owed me and after my bank debacle, I was able to send another extra $100 towards our credit card.

I’m glad all these small extra payments allowed me to make some small progress towards our credit card debt. I’m only sad that we still charged so much on our credit card over the month. If we had charged less over the month, these small payments would have made a bigger dent. I can’t change the past, but I can continue to work to improve our future. Again, I’m trying to look on the bright side and be glad that we made payments that totaled more than we charged this month; and that these small extra payments are actually the difference of why that happened, without them our debt would have actually risen again.

I need to remember that EVERY little bit helps!

Taking my credit card out of my wallet was one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made. Although we still made charges on the card over the month, the amount we’ve charged has seriously decreased; hence, the reason we were able to actually make progress towards our credit card at all, albeit just a little bit.

September Debt Update

My last debt update had some real truth in it… some real painful truth! I was sticking my head in the sand when it came to my credit card and my debt and that’s no way to live life! And definitely no way to get out of debt. It’s only been a month, but I have seen some progress; not so much in our debt totals (though those have decreased slightly) but in my attitude towards debt and my rededication to paying cash and not relying on my credit card. I know what I’m about to admit is slightly pathetic, but it’s also honest, taking my credit card out of my wallet was one of the smartest financial decisions I’ve made in a long time! I wish I could say I had enough willpower to not swipe my card, but I just didn’t. I would swipe and then feel guilty afterward. Now I’m making progress.

Okay, on to our debt update!

The debt we owe our children has continued to (ever so slowly) decrease. We borrowed almost $1500 from each child and have paid back $1050 to each of them, which means we are just over two-thirds of the way through paying them back! Although once we have fully paid them back, we will continue to deposit $50 into their bank accounts, I will be so happy when I can no longer consider them a debt! Our car loan has continued to decrease as well. 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.

Our constant struggle is our credit card. I have only been trying to do a cash only budget for about 6 weeks and The Husband is not on board, but I’m hoping to see some slow progress. Our credit card debt had increased mightily from April to August, but for the first time in several months, the balance went down; not by much, but it is progress. On the plus side the loans to our kids and the car loan are slowly decreasing. For the first time in literally months, our overall debt decreased this month! (I am so happy to get to be writing that instead of having to say again that our debt went up!)

Here are our current debt totals:

            $20523.18          Credit Card at 16.24% interest

            $450                 The Girl

            $450                 The Boy

            $6165.00           Car Loan at 0% interest

Our total debt stands at: $27,588.18. YIKES! I can hardly wrap my head around that number. I absolutely HATE seeing a 2 as the first number on our credit card and that is my first priority… get that number back under $20000. In the grand scheme of things, the actual amount of debt is not that much less but psychologically there is a huge difference!

Plus side: our debt dropped from 28K-something to 27K-something. We paid off over $750 of debt in actual dollars, which amounted to about 2.7% of our total debt.

Down side: we only paid off a little over $300 of credit card debt in actual dollars after stupid tax, er, interest.

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $20000 and working towards my goal of under $18000 by 12/31/18. Bringing our car loan down into the $5K-something range. And bringing our debt from $27K-something to 26K-something.

Obviously all my financial goals for the year have been thrown out the window. There are only 3 months of the year left and I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be. However, I can’t change the past, all I can do is improve my future. Since our credit card debt is nearly $21000, my goal for the end of 2018 is to be under $18000 in credit card debt. My other debts will continue to decrease at their slow and steady pace, but I am going to payoff $3000 in credit card debt by the end of the year. That’s my goal. This is another one of these realistic stretch goals.

We didn’t pay off as much debt as I would have liked in total dollars. No-Spend September should increase our debt payoff numbers for next month, however. I’m hoping to almost double the amount of money we pay off next month.

In order to be successful, some things will have to fall in place for us. My raise and retro pay will have to go into effect as that is how I am planning to pay for Christmas this year, coupled with some Amazon gift cards. November’s three paycheck month extra check will be able to primarily go towards credit card debt. And The Husband will have to fully max out his 401K two weeks into December as we are anticipating so we will get extra money in his paychecks in the end of December.

Obviously, 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.

Some things I’m looking forward to: by our next debt update in October, we should be below $20000 in credit card debt and working towards getting it lower! And, through no effort of our own, our car loan will fall below $6000 and be in the $5000’s, (this is purely through our regular payments and not something we had any hand in), however it will still be a good feeling to see that number falling.

Also over the next month I will continue to try to live credit card free, throw any extra money towards our credit card debt and stick to our budget! This all combined with my only real financial goal right now, getting our credit card debt below $18000 by New Year’s Eve!

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

Look out goal #1: below $18000 in credit card debt by 12/31/18… I’m coming for you!

Another No-Spend Update

We had another grocery shopping trip.

We actually didn’t go to any of our regular grocery stores. We went to Target. My mom was here over the weekend and as a treat for No-Spend September, she bought the kids a movie and we had an at-home movie night.

Since we went to Target to buy a movie, we just did our grocery shopping for the week there.

We spent $22.27. We only needed hummus and hamburger buns for our dinner menus, but we also bought some fruit, tortillas, and bagels to round out the week.

We still had $311.97 of our food budget remaining. After subtracting our total from Target, we have $289.70 to last us the rest of the month. As we are nearly 2/3 through the month, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to do this.

October will be very expensive for groceries and not because we did without for September, but because we try so hard to eat out of our pantry and freezer for September. We will need to buy meat, lunch meat, milk (always!), cheese, bread, and snacks. We should be able to stay in budget in October; we just won’t have much money left over!

Oh well, one month at a time and I feel like September is going pretty well!

Quick No-Spend September Update

A little truth in blogging post... technically, we probably shouldn't have bought this because it is No-Spend September, but it was food and for a good cause so we did it anyway!

This morning I used $25 from our food envelope to purchase a tri-tip dinner for 4 from The Boy’s Ag-Bio class fundraiser.

It will be our dinner one day next week.

We had $336.97 remaining in our food budget for the month. We spent $25 so our remaining total is $311.97.

This weekend we will do grocery shopping for the week. We need some perishables to supplement our dinners for the week. We will need fruits and veggies for the week, some milk, and a few staples. It shouldn’t be too expensive of a shopping trip.

We should still be able to stay within budget for the month.