Payoff Month 4

March:

cc1,2,3,4: 0

cc5: 6048.51

Loan1: 4637.26

Loan 2: 11477.91

Loan 3: 12351.85

Debt: 34515.53

Paid last month: 1424.72

April

cc 1,2,3,4: 0
cc5: 6105.14 *

Loan 1: 4542.19
Loan 2: 11437.74
Loan 3: 11401.28 **

Debt: 33486.35
Paid: 1085.81

Total Paid: 10421.53

* Yeah, I know that is higher this month. Here's the deal. When my husband went to take care of his parents, he had to buy them a lot of stuff and run a lot of errands for them, plus buy the plane ticket. He used his credit card. His dad has since paid him back, but that isn't going to show up until the next statement. So, while that is a false total, it is what it is, and I am dealing with printed statement totals. About half of that should be gone next month.

** This is the loan to my father. I have done some reworking and decided to pay this off before my other student loan. Doing so not only allows me to hit my student loan fast and hard (because my payment to my dad is higher) but also allows me to pay my dad off by the end of the year, which is really appealing. The total owed changes, then, because I will owe less interest to him in the end, so this is lower than it was for those reasons.

So, while not a great month in the payoff department, we did surpass $10,000 paid, we are still on track for our payoff dates, and we should show some big losses in next month's report.

Mid month update

Happy tax day!

We had to pay $2000. But we are also getting $800 back from the state. Had to dip into savings for this. I think this has something to do with our mortgage set up right now. If'n we refi soon, maybe it will straighten itself out. I have tabled the refi for now.

We have had an estimate for our roof, and another one coming next week. They think it was a bullet! I forget exactly, but it was around $850. The people coming next week can also do our siding repair (which is probably from settling), so I am waiting to see what that looks like. We have about $1000 saved for this, and I want it done already.

Counting down to my cousin's wedding. I get an extra paycheck this month, which should cover the hotel. We also have $200 in the travel fund, and the $400 in the sinking fund to cover any other expenses. I don't expect many, but we will have parking and miscellaneous spending. I still need to get a gift, too.

My husband needs new tires. Like, one if his tires is literally completely flat. I still haven't worked out how we are going to pay for this.

The good news is, my husband's boss called him last week and gave him a promotion and an 8% raise. It seems to amount to about $360 more take home a month. It was shocking how quickly I found places for that money to go. I had so many things I wanted to fund, and hadn't yet, that the whole thing is not going to debt repayment, as I might like. Starting in May, We will begin a car fund. Both our cars are old, and I am holding my breath that they will both make it another year (let alone long enough to save for another one). My husband's car is ten years old and has over 150,000 miles. I gave us each a raise in our personal money. I think we deserve it. We have had very little fun money. Now we are up to an amount we can actually use for something we want. I doubled what we are saving for our lawn boy - both because we are going to start needing him again, and because I expect his rates to increase again this year. The rest seems to be ironing out things that were getting ignored in the budget, such as the bills being charged on our cards and the quarterly bills. It doesn't last long. But it is good to have. I am just disappointed, because somehow I thought we could get our debt repayment up to 2900 a month, but I guess that was not a realistic figure. I was not accounting for things properly.

I am also struggling with the fact that I am "saving" about $500 a month into these funds. I could pay things off faster if I didn't. But I feel better knowing that we are building money towards these things, should they happen. Our travel and pet funds are about to take another hit. The repairs we have are outpacing what I am saving for them by far. I have decided to put caps on some of these things. If I manage to hit the cap, then I can cut back the saving there until I have to use the money.

April Budget

April Budget

Fixed

I anticipate a drop in power this month. We have taken out life insurance, so I expected to pay about an additional $60 in the insurance category a month, starting in April.

Debt

Cards 1-4 are paid off, so we are pounding on my husband's credit card now.

Variable

I can finally start my travel fund. Continuing the repair fund. Everything else appears to be the same as any other month.

Short and sweet :)

March budget

Here is my March budget. I couldn't find the one I printed out in February, and I think I messed with the spreadsheet a lot since then, but this is still pretty close to our plan.

Fixed

I was still anticipating a high power bill. Lower cable. I added the server back in - They were offering us half what we were paying before and we were having a lot of trouble with reliable connection from home, so we were considering going back. As of this writing, we still have not, but I have it in there just in case. Our trash bill was due this month. I took out some of the other quarterly expenses because it was just confusing me. Both on the budget and the bank account. I know you are supposed to save the month's portion each month, but it is just not working for me, so I am going to try to just recognize the bill when it comes due. I also removed the bills which are charged to my husband's card, because now we are just paying on that card, and I don't really have to account for the extra to keep the balance even. I will either add those back in when his card is paid off or encourage him to have them taken from the bank account instead.

Debt

I struggled with this a lot. I had wanted to pay my credit card off in Feb and then put $2000 to my husband's card. We would have had it paid off in May then. With the various crises that arose, I felt it more prudent to hold some money back for a couple months to help pay for stuff. So, we planned to pay off my credit card in March and only $1000 to my husband's. Minimums on all else.

Variables

My car came due, so I had to pay my taxes and emissions. I was so aware of it because of the budget, I think this is the first year ever I had it done weeks ahead of time. Two of our cats were due for shots, so I upped our pet allotment to cover that. I added a new fund for repairs, with the $400 held back from debt for the month (plus the $500 from last month).

February income statement

February income statement

Revenue

I got an extra week's pay in one of my paychecks. My husband deposited some birthday money. I believe some of the bank balance is for our March mortgage, but I am not quite sure. It just seems high to me.

Fixed

Power was super high. Just look at that. Ugh. We had some snow and some very cold days. We are finally seeing the lowered cable price, though that does include a partial refund for the month, so future cable should be around $80. I still think that is super high for the basic stuff. We had our termite bill for the quarter.

Debt repayment

Just when I thought #2 was paid, it hit me with a $5 interest charge from the previous month. I now have that paid off again. I own my carpet (#3). We paid off most of cc#4 which is my main card. I was going to pay the whole thing, but then the fiasco with the roof, and I opted to save some money for that instead. That was a very hard decision to make. Minimums to all else.

Variable

Most of these are discussed in the cash jar post. Some highlights: Pet. Is very high, because we adopted our dog, and purchased items for him. This figure includes the money we also still set aside for the pet jar. The only thing I can say for myself, is I did that all with cash. Mostly money from my extra paycheck that month. We bought our convention tickets for this summer, so that is set. Bank fees are finance charges. Other than the dog, we really stuck to (or below) our budget for this month.

Savings

We added $120 to the sinking fund from the cash jars for the month. We saved $500 towards our roof repair, instead of paying off a credit card.

Looking back, I am not sure I calculated the bank balances properly, and we way overspent on the pet category (and power!) but we came out positive and did really well overall, I think.

March cash jars and memoriam

March was hard. That may have something to do with my lack of updates this month. Again, I hope to get everything caught up in the next few days. We don't have a lot of money left over, and it is actually more than I initially thought. I think in part, the fact that it was a five week month made it hard to get through. We also had some "lost" money, where we pulled money from whatever jar had it and we now don't know where it went.

The month started with my husband getting his crowns. Luckily, we were able to use our health flex card to pay for those. So, we don't feel the hit from that, but it used the most of our health allocation for the year.

Two of our cats got their shots. My husband forgot to get cash from the jar for that, so he used the debit card. He also spent more than I was expecting.

Then my husband flew off to Texas to take care of his family for two weeks. His mom came through her lung surgery and the biopsy said it isn't cancer.

We had someone out to look at our roof. The roof of the house is in good shape, but the porch roof needs to be replaced. The insurance won't cover it, but it will probably cost less than the deductible anyway.

Our house lost partial power last week while I was here on my own. I was freaking out, imagining walls getting knocked out and rewiring and cost and everything. I had an electrician out, and had to pay $120 for that. He determined it was a problem for the power company. They came right out, dug up my front yard, and did something to cause the power to come back, and I didn't have to pay anything further.

This was a "make it work" month.

Jar~~~~~Used~~~~~Left
Gas~~~~~~125~~~~~~~~0
Grocery~~~378~~~~~~~~20
Take out~~60~~~~~~~~~0
Misc~~~~~47~~~~~~~~~3
Supplies~~24~~~~~~~~~26
Unknown~~~~~~~~~~~~10

Add to sinking: 59