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Sunday, November 1, 2009

Sidebar Updates

First post of the new month and I have updated my sidebars.

Progress Not Perfection

This month for my espresso challenge I will attempt to go 24 days without buying from Starbucks. I am limiting myself to Sundays and Thanksgiving day.

My emergency fund goal for right now is only $1000 until I can get some things paid off. I would prefer my emergency fund to be around $3000 at all times. Because of our refinance we don't have a mortgage payment this month.

The car rehab fund is for the money the hubs made selling his 87 BMW. That $2400 is going towards a few repairs and the purchase of an 89 Porsche the hubs is buying from my dad. This fund should go away by the end of the year.

The travel fund is set for $2000. This is a number I pulled out of my head. The hubs and I are going to Savannah next spring or summer for a long over due honeymoon. We think we can do the trip for around $2000. The money for this fund this year will come from our tax return.

The hubs and I would eventually like to have two laptops and no desktop machine. We are going to start with one laptop and an external hard drive. We have a budget of $600 for the laptop and will be looking to buy around Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving). We are due some money from our old mortgage for prepaid property taxes in escrow. That money, plus any money we make selling things on Craigslist will go here.

Debt Reduction

We have used our credit cards since paying them off in August. Some things were necessary and some were not. I do make more than the minimum payments on them. The ultimate goal is not to use them but they are available now until we can get things paid off and money saved to free up more of our take home pay. We have only used 14% of our available credit.

The personal loan from my parents is something I want to aggressively pay off once I have my car & credit cards paid off and more money in savings.

My car loan is about half paid off and this is what I am focusing on right now. This month I plan to put an additional $400 on my $200 payment.

The hubs student loan is something we are going to continue to put a minimum payment on. It has the lowest interest rate of anything (except the loan to my parents) but because the balance to my parents is so much larger I would prefer to pay that off first.

The mortgage and home equity loan have zero percentage pay down because we just refinanced a couple weeks ago. Our first payments are due in December.

The Christmas knitting projects are pretty self explanatory.

1 comment:

Laume said...

Hi - I wandered over after reading your comment on "Onsimplicity.net", which I wandered into for the first time today. I wanted to say I too have started using my good china and fragile things. I'll undoubtedly lose a large number of them to breakage since I have a house with a husband, large teens, cats. But I've also discovered that my adult children really don't have attachments to the same things I do. So I should just enjoy what I like and not keep it safe for them to someday have to sell at a yard sale after I'm gone. The decision has really added to my quality of life.
On espresso and Starbucks abuse. Hubby and I broke down and bought a medium priced espresso maker this spring. Not a cheap one that's useless, not one so expensive we had to make payments on it, but the least expensive sturdy quality machine we could find. We stopped going to Starbucks and it paid for itself within months. I've been traveling a lot this last month and gotten back into the habit of buying my coffee out and ACK, it's a bad habit. Starbucks cappuccino or latte - around $3. Equivalent at home - less than 50 cents. Rambling here - but hi, nice to meetcha.