Debt Update April

As you know, life went topsy-turvy for the whole world during this last two months! I’m sorry my debt update is so late, but blogging has taken a backseat during this time. The Covid19 virus has changed the life of so many people! Us included. It has been an interesting 7 weeks with still more to come. Writing for my blog has not been my priority, but I wanted to update you all on my progress, what there was of it.

This debt update is based on our March 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! Due to life going sideways, home quarantining, and social distancing, this update is a little late. But, better late than not at all!

Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, I am happy to say that for the third month in a row our overall debt decreased! It didn’t decrease by leaps and bounds, but we did make progress so I have to take my wins where I can get them.

Here is our current debt totals:

           $17,167.01Credit Card at 16.74% interest

      

Our total debt stands at: $17,167.01 YIKES! It’s 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 started actively tracking our debt again! Our debt decreased! We paid off $117.93 of credit card debt; that only amounted to .06% of our total debt, not even 1 whole percent!?!?! 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!

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $17,000 (☹) and keeping it that way. 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! I am also looking forward to getting our total debt below $17,000. 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! April has been another very expensive month (ironically) so I’m hoping our credit card balance doesn’t increase and we can actually get the balance down!

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!

April 20 for 2020 Update Part 2

Welcome back to installment 2 of April’s 20 for 2020 update. In my last post I reviewed the first 10 goals of our 20 for 2020. Here’s how we are doing on the last 10…

1.       Open, and use, a Health Savings Account for The Husband’s braces.

Pass: This is done! The Husband’s company loads all the money at once, even though it is only taken from his paycheck each pay period. The braces are paid for in full (we got a 5% discount for paying all at once) and The Husband loaded a little extra money to pay for doctor’s appointments throughout the year!

2.       Increase my 403b contributions by $100 sometime during the year.

No progress here: Still no action on this goal.  Hopefully sometime in the next 10 months.

3.       Increase The Husband’s 401k contributions by 3% by the end of the year.

On-track: The Husband earned a 3% raise this year! Yeah! We have already designated 2% to his 401k and when his work-aversary comes around in August, another 1% will automatically be added! He is very close to maxing out his 401k contributions. Next year should do it and then we can start upping my contributions!

4.       Have one billing period where I don’t charge ANYTHING (except autopays) on my credit card.

Fail: Charged way more than I even wanted to last month and already have several charges on the statement for April. Again, with “sheltering-in-place” we don’t have many options but to purchase online!

5.       Have a successful “No-Spend” September.

No progress here: It’s not September…

6.       I want to drink the loose-leaf tea I already have and not buy anymore until I am only down to 3 flavors.

Fail: With “shelter-in-place” orders, our local stores are suffering. My favorite local store does “Facebook live” sales and I bought tea off her live. It was worth it because I was out of my favorite flavor and I want to have a store to go back to once this is all over. However, that is the ONLY loose leaf tea I have bought.

7.       Add all our “subscriptions” to our monthly budget.

Pass: All done! Going forward, all our “subscriptions” or monthly recurring charges are an item line on our monthly budget sheet.

8.       Don’t spend any money, out of pocket, on supplies for my classroom. (This does not include lessons I might choose to purchase.)

On-track-ish: This one is really difficult. I purchased a video converting program, but still no actual supplies. With the idea of “distance learning” this has been even more difficult! But, I haven’t bought anything yet!

9.       Keep current (monthly) with what I owe The Kids.

Pass:  I tallied up what they were owed and paid them all out! We broke it down into savings, spending, and tithing and I am now current with what I owe them!

10.   Check in on my financial goals monthly.

Pass: Same as last month: so far so good. It’s so easy to be vigilant at the beginning of the year. The real test will be if we are checking in on our goals next October!

Overall, I’d give myself a B. I am “passing” on 10 of 20 goals, on track with 4 more, “failing” with only 4 of our goals, and “on hold” or “not yet started” another 2. I’m feeling pretty good about our start. We still have a long way to go but are making pretty good progress.

Overall my successes are in mostly the same categories and so are my failures… Must do better. Must put in more effort!

I can’t stress enough the fact that if we are successful with these goals, we will definitely be creating a firmer financial foundation!

April 20 for 2020 Update

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!

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 month! With quarantining and social distancing, tracking our spending has fallen WAY down the list!

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!

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

Pass: So far so good. We donated $300 in January and February, and March. 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, we need to set up online giving for the month of April at least. Totally doable, but not done yet!

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.

On-track: After February, we had already deposited $3433 towards our goal of $5000. In March, we deposited an additional $453 (above and beyond our regular savings and not including our “car payment”. That comes to a total of $3886 towards our goal. We are 77% of the way to our goal only 3 months through the year! Feeling confident about this one!

9.       Meal plan 8 months out of the year.

On-track: Because our goal is 8 months, I will still say we are on-track. Covid 19 has thrown our whole life into disarray so we did not meal plan for April; but, I am hoping to get back to it come May.

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!

Life Lately

Life has been crazy lately. Just like it has been for everybody else.

The Husband and I are always saying we would like our lives to slow down just a little bit, but as he said, we didn't mean for it to come to a screeching halt! LOL!

This virus is changing the world and changing the way the world is going to look afterwards.

For us, school was shut down on March 13th and I have been home since then, mostly not working. I have had a week full of meetings, but those have almost all been focused on plans for next year. Currently, our district is awaiting more information from the CDE before it decides how it wants to move forward. I'm super blessed because we are still getting paid so I am not losing my paycheck or having to worry about how I will pay my bills.

The Kids are (obviously) home. All of their various activities have been cancelled except dance (I'll get to that in a minute). No school. no FFA meetings or competitions, no baseball, no sleepovers, no hangouts, nothing. The Daughter is taking her dance classes virtually over Zoom. It's not ideal but it is a way that she can still be engaged and they can still provide something for the kids to do.

Another huge blessing is that The Husband is able to work from home. He regularly works from home one day a week but with the virus and the shelter in place directive in California, he is working from home every day. He works in an essential business and as such could go into work if needed, however because he CAN work from home, he gets too. Not all employees at his company are so lucky, many of them have to go into work to do their job.

Being home has allowed me a lot of time to relax and get caught up on life. It has given me the time to do so many things I had been putting off! I have: cleaned and spot treated my mom's vintage linens, done the same to her wedding dress, cleaned my house and stayed on top of laundry, had time to do bible study and scripture memorization every day, worked out or walked/run every day, worked puzzles, and watched movies with my family. The time we have gotten to spend together is priceless!

I'm very lucky, too because I plan my meals a month ahead. The grocery stores where we live have been crazy! We have not had to brave them much. We had all the food we needed for the month of March except perishables. We have produce deliver every other week and have for about 7 years. We have had to go to the grocery store mainly for milk and eggs. It's not been too bad.

I hope you are all staying safe and healthy during these turbulent times!

Debt Update March

As you know, life went topsy-turvy for the whole world during this last month! I’m sorry my debt update is so late, but blogging has taken a backseat during this time. The Covid19 virus has changed the life of so many people! Us included. It has been an interesting 3 weeks with several more to come. Writing for my blog has not been my priority, but I wanted to update you all on my progress, what there was of it.

This debt update is based on our February 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! Due to life going sideways, home quarantining, and social distancing, this update is a little late. But, better late than not at all!

Although we are not paying off our debt as fast as I would like, I am happy to say that for the second month in a row our overall debt decreased! It didn’t decrease by leaps and bounds, but we did make progress so I have to take my wins where I can get them.

Here are our current debt totals:

            $17,284.94     Credit Card at 16.74% interest

            $0                   Car Loan at 0% interest    

      

Our total debt stands at: $17,865.60 YIKES! It’s 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. (As an aside, ironically, our overall debt didn’t grow too much from our last update, but it is still above our last total. Our credit card debt increased but with our continued monthly payments for the car loan, they almost cancelled each other out.)

Plus side: we started actively tracking our debt again! Our debt decreased! We paid off $285.66 of credit card debt and $295 of car debt, for a total of $580.66; that only amounted to 3.3% of our total debt. 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 paid off our car!!!!! 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!

Looking forward to: getting our credit card debt below $17,000 (☹) and keeping it that way. 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! I am also looking forward to getting our total debt below $17,000. I know I said this earlier, but I’m really excited that we paid our car off!!! We have two, reliable, paid for cars and no car payment! Last time we paid off a car, we had to buy one for The Husband the very next month and didn’t get to enjoy having no car payment for even one month!

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!

March 20 for 2020 Goals Check-In Part Two

Welcome back to installment 2 of March’s 20 for 2020 update. In my last post I reviewed the first 10 goals of our 20 for 2020. Here’s how we are doing on the last 10…

     11. Open, and use, a Health Savings Account for The Husband’s braces.

Pass: This is done! The Husband’s company loads all the money at once, even though it is only taken from his paycheck each pay period. The braces are paid for in full (we got a 5% discount for paying all at once) and The Husband loaded a little extra money to pay for doctor’s appointments throughout the year!

12. Increase my 403b contributions by $100 sometime during the year.

No progress here: Still no action on this goal.  Hopefully sometime in the next 10 months.

13. Increase The Husband’s 401k contributions by 3% by the end of the year.

No progress here: Hoping to accomplish this through a raise… The Husband’s review is usually around March so we should know by the end of this month if this will be easily feasible or not. He generally receives a 3+% raise that we designate to retirement.

14. Have one billing period where I don’t charge ANYTHING (except autopays) on my credit card.

Fail: Charged way more than I even wanted to last month and already have several charges on the statement for March.

15. Have a successful “No-Spend” September.

No progress here: It’s not September…

16.  I want to drink the loose-leaf tea I already have and not buy anymore until I am only down to 3 flavors.

Pass: This one is funny, I know; but I have so much loose tea that I feel like I need to focus on drinking what I have before I buy more. I haven’t bought loose-leaf tea in a whole month! For me, that is nearly unheard of! (Mind you, I still have probably 25+ flavors!) I’m also calling it a pass because I have finished 2 more flavors of loose tea since I wrote (and updated) this goal!

       17. Add all our “subscriptions” to our monthly budget.

Pass: All done! Going forward, all our “subscriptions” or monthly recurring charges are an item line on our monthly budget sheet.

18. Don’t spend any money, out of pocket, on supplies for my classroom. (This does not include lessons I might choose to purchase.)

On-track-ish: This one is really difficult. I purchased a video converting program, but still no actual supplies.

19. Keep current (monthly) with what I owe The Kids.

Fail: I still owe them for old hours and haven’t paid them. This is just sheer laziness! I need to do the math and gather the money. Must do better here! I have literally done nothing on this front since my last update! My goal is to be all caught up and current by my next update in April!

      20.  Check in on my financial goals monthly.

Pass: Same as last month: so far so good. It’s so easy to be vigilant at the beginning of the year. The real test will be if we are checking in on our goals next October!

Overall, I’d give myself a B. I am “passing” on 11 of 20 goals, (which is an improvement over last month’s update), on track with 3 more, “failing” with only 3 of our goals, and “on hold” or “not yet started” another 3. I’m feeling pretty good about our start. We still have a long way to go but are making pretty good progress.

Overall my successes are in mostly the same categories and so are my failures… Must do better. Must put in more effort!

I can’t stress enough the fact that if we are successful with these goals, we will definitely be creating a firmer financial foundation!

March 20 for 2020 Goal Check-In Part One

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!

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. We had a several unexpected windfalls and put half of each towards debt plus made our regularly scheduled payments. So, again, I would say 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.

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

Pass: We tracked January and it wasn’t pretty. I’m hopeful for March. We will need to be diligent in tracking our spending. It will be a busy month with dance competitions and the high school baseball season starting. I’m hoping we are too busy to spend too much money!

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…

      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.

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

Pass: So far so good. We donated $300 in January and February. 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.

6. Pay off car!

PASS: I’m very pleased to say that we paid our last car payment and now are just awaiting our pink slip! I’m super excited and am very happy to be “car debt” free… (for as long as that lasts).  We haven’t done this yet, but we did make our January payment and have one payment left in February until we own the car outright!

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 February, we paid off our car. The final payment was $295. Since we budget $350, I put the remaining $55 into our savings account. March’s “payment” is budgeted for already too!

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

On-track: I have deposited the first 14 weeks into savings and budgeted for the next 4 after that. Additionally, we received several unexpected windfalls that we split between debt and savings, so we deposited an unexpected $3433 into our savings. After only 2 months we are 69% of the way towards fully meeting this goal! Feeling confident about this one!

       9. Meal plan 8 months out of the year.

On-track: So far I have planned our meals for every month this year! Including March! I’m feeling on a roll here! As our lives get busier and more hectic with kids sports and activities and the end of the school year nearing, we always do better when we have a plan! It’s nice to have an idea of what we will have for dinner and knowing we have the ingredients on-hand!

       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!