Lol.. no it's not a tradition in any circle, however, nothing about us fits tradition at all. We were couple number #8 at the circuit court clerk, we totally eloped when we were 21 years old. During our 5th year anniversary I completely dropped the ball and never got a gift, while she got me something awesome. Since the only ring she ever had was a wedding band.. and well... I owed things from last years mess up.

Good news!!!!

Our health insurance covered a premium that we had paid earlier and sent us a check for $190 AND on top of it, our mortgage refinance lender with wells fargo messed up. They had set the loan amount at 123,000. Which is clearly in correct as our principal was 118,000 and we were not intending to take any cash out. So, to cover up for this mistake, the corrected the principal amount AND they waved all closing cost fees!! Which means I'll be able to transfer money from my normal bank BACK into my Emergency fun.

Looks like in Feb. I do get to pass go and collect $200.

Also, we had planned to go out and buy a gift for a friends birthday party. It was a big deal as he was turning 30 and is a friend almost as close as family. So we had budgeted $200 for the night + gift. We came in under budget after the night out (which was tonight so I am a bit toasted... ) at $160 for the three of us.

I open my mail box and checked my voice mail to hear the other good news as well!

W00t!

Fabulous news on the refi!

See there, CB, things tend to work out, eh?

I'm so happy for you. You guys needed some good news.

Refinance done as of today.

Also found out we will be able to do weekly payments on our mortgage for no extra charge or anything. This works out well since I'm paid weekly.



Mortgage: $650 (5.25% Fixed)
Association Fees: $311
Groceries: $640 a month.
Going out to eat / misc. weekly expenses: $400
Gas: $150
Netflix: $15.99
Sprint Phone Bill: $130
Comcast Cable and Internet: $131
Electric: $188
Gas (car): $100
Water: $15
Taxes: $350 (into our own escrow account)
*Union Dues: $98 (Payed every three months in one lump sum of 288)


Income: $5092
Bills: $3178.99
Leftover: $1,913.01
Automatic Savings: $1092.00

Leaking budget numbers: $821.01 (This is my budget forecast for March. Should everything work out planned, I should have this amount left over. If so, then I"ll do something smart. So far I know of $80.00 for tolls I might have to pay, along with $500 in medical bills that may show up in march and an additional $120 in gifts / other things that may come up in march.)

Every month something does seem to come up.

Just got approval from the misses today on the new budget.

As of today, automatically withdrawn will be:

Paycheck net take home: $1273 a week.
Automatically Withdrawn for Use: $385
Mortgage Payments will be Weekly: $164
Self Tax Escrow: $77

Left per week: $647.

This means I'm socking away into savings for future use $20,000 a year as of March 1st.

I'll make a separate post about what I should be doing with this later.

Well, I guess I should post a bit of an update for march. I do want to say one thing though: When your not paying off debt, everything seems to move a bit slower...

Okay, here is the update:

Since Jan. 1st our Emergency Fund is now at the grand total of:

$3,257.08

Woot! At the end of the month it will be $3,800. My goal is around $20,000 for that EM So I guess to follow format of others:

$3,257.08 / $20,000

In other news, our new mortgage is all set up to go with Weekly Payments and an additional $85 to principal every week for the time being. It will start for sure on April 16th. Very happy about this I am.

Escrowing my own taxes this time around and that particular fund is moving along nicely as well.

We have some left over medical bills we got this month, and we'll take care of them all this month as well. March will end again debt free.

And we also made the last $125 "charity"payment for are last debt that was for my Wifes Father. So, as of the month of March. We are officially, 100% out of all debt but our Mortgage.

All in all, things are good at the moment. I'm still struggling with quiting smoking and purchasing them and we occasionally break down and pick up food from outside. I'm really not sure there is anything in our immediate budget we could cut out. Next month my wife and I are going to incure some more medical expenses. We are going to the Dentist, Chiropractor, General Practitioner, and Eye Doctor. None of them are for any existing conditions. We figure we have good health insurance, we might as well use it for some general check ups.

I mean, hell, if you don't have your health, what do you have?

Goals:

Fully Fund EM to $20,000.
Get a Will
Do some Basic Home Maintenance Repairs
Get Orthodics for boots. (These things are great for posture)
Do all medical General Check Ups and pay all remaining medical bills from it.
Do some basic preventive Auto Repair to keep my car ticking.
Update Wardrobe for the next year and go through closets.
Brace ourselves for the month of may. (The land of 16 birthdays + mothers day. All of them gift mandatory. (All birthdays in our family are in may. It's weird)
Pay off Mortgage
Save for New Car
Maintain Debt Free Status.

Okay Update:

When we refinanced our place, the mortgage company took the escrow balance we had and applied it to the principal. So in the end, instead of a $123,000 Mortgage, we have a $119,000. Now, I'm paying extra mortgage each month and I'll just let that be. It annoyed me however because of this:

I opted to escrow my own taxes. Sure enough, Tax time comes and my first tax bill is 2100. I only had 1,300 in my tax escrow account at the time and that means the rest had to come from EM savings.

So for the first time, we fell below the scheduled min. of $1,000 per month in our EM Fund. At the end of April we had $4,000. Now we have $3,500. Granted by the end of June we will be completely caught up again... it will end up going down again in September... but it will catch back up by Jan 1st so everything is still on track.

Ultimately ahead is ahead. It's just more fun being further ahead

Alright, it's been a while. Time for an update. The reason for the slower updates is because honestly it seems like not much progress is happening.

However, new things:

I got the "Okay" from my wife to look into hooking the computer up to the TV and cutting the cable bill. The problem is we have a rather complicated AV set up with HDMI cables running all over the place and... ugh, yeah it's a nightmare. However, it's worth $54 a month plus will remove the temptation of ordering movies on demand which sometimes we can't help ourselves due to sheer boredom and netflix taking to long.

Our Mortgage is down to $116,500 since the last update. I'm paying an additional $85 a week into it.

Our Emergency fund is back up to $1,500 as of today. If you read the last post, you'll find that it's past the property tax point so the reason for the lower fund is we had to dip into that. However, that is all paid up and done and next years taxes will be plenty covered. Now $250 a week goes right into that EM fund.

Car Payment. We now as of July have a $365 a month 0% interest rate car payment from a new car we purchased. As mentioned in other threads, we keep our cars for... 10+ years until they fall apart at the seams. With our 2 year old, we bought a new car for both upgraded safety and reliability and warranty. Plus, we liked it. Sue me. Either way, the biggest problem with this car payment is that it is in fact 0%. I have the hardest time in the world not diverting all extra funds to pay it off.

So that's where I'm at now. Any Suggestions?

Hey.
Just because your car interest rate is 0%, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't divert your extra funds towards it. One suggestion I have is that you should divert your extra payments towards your e-fund. 1500 really isn't that much considering you have a wife and a baby. I would use your extra money towards building it up again and then put the extra towards the car if you're so inclined. Do you have a college fund set up for the baby, retirement for yourself? Do you have a fund for your next new car? There are places that money could go.

Hrm. 1500 is not much you are 100% correct.

Here is what I have in terms of Retirement:

My Annuity gets about $800 a month. It's at roughly $33,000 in a Retirement ready mixed mutual fund set for 2040. I'm 28 now and if the pace keeps up with contributions (aka as long as I stay employed) then this will be a nice chunk.

I do want to open up a supplemental retirement fund as well. All eggs in one basket is not my style but this one is on the far back burner.

We have no college fund set up for Trent. For that matter, the Life Insurance documents are still sitting on our Kitchen counter.

However I am putting $250 a week into the EM fund, or generally about $1,000 a month. To fully have 6 months of my gross income I would need $42,000 dollars in there. That number seems insurmountable to me. It really does.

The funds I could free up are the $368 additional Mortgage principal I'm paying and $54 for getting rid of cable. I'd have to spend about $300 in hardware on new computer parts but after one month that would free up:
$422 a month.

My current plan was to keep the status quo of what we are doing now for a little while longer. When Trent turns 3 next June, He's going to be going to Pre-school and the Wife returns to work. Adding a second income to this is what we were really going to use for a lot of the side investments.

I am a huge fan of prepaying my mortgage down and it's moving rather fast for me with not that much being put forth. But if people really think that the $1,000 a month into the EM fund isn't enough, I can shift that around to make it $1,420 or so.

Cranky, two quick items:

1) Since you have Netflix and like on-demand movies, look into getting a Roku. The box costs ~ $100, and it allows you to instantly play movies on your TV. For the cost of 2 months' of cable...

2) I agree that the EFund needs to increase before you start paying off the car loan. What happened to your $20K goal there?

Sandi

2) 20k goal is still there. It's just moving slowly. At the current rate of $1,000 a month it will take 19 more months to get there. I had to draw from the EM fund this year for the following things: Property Taxes 1, Property Taxes 2 (due to that mortgage error where they applied my escrow direct to principal). I also had to repair a furnace, and a (2) hospital emergency room visits. Even with great health coverage medical bills can still nail down your savings significanlty. I also took a portion of the EM fund for the car down payment when our old car died on us. I had to put down a certain amount to get the 0% financing.

The upside is at least I'm aware of savings and prepayment this year. Last year at this time I was not saving any money albeit I carried no debt.

It just seems that the "building your EM fund" portion of all of this is damn hard. It goes so slowly and my heart rate goes up when I think about how much I make per week vs how much is in my EM fund.

::sigh::

1) Roku, I'll look into it.

If 1000 dollars is sufficient for you, go for it. I live by myself and I don't think 1000 dollars is enough for me if something happened (furnace went up, roof caved in, car accident), so I have a little more. I certainly don't have 42,000 worth, but I have enough where I'm happy.

Also, they say that you should have 6 months of expenses, not necessarily gross income. That's way over the top because if you're unemployed, you arent' going to be buying lunch, spending gas money driving to work, etc.. I would try to reach a goal of 3-6 months net at a minimum, but do what you feel comfortable with. That's really the bottom line. If you go to the emergency room again, 1000 dollars probably won't cut it.

Slow and steady wins the race.