Financial Update

So, as far as finances are concerned, we have had a lot of change recently. I started a part-time job back in October, to help bring in a little extra and snowball our credit card debt. I started a spreadsheet in May of 2010 to help track our debt progress (complete debt, as well as broken down into credit card, mortgages, etc...)

Here were the numbers in May of 2010.

Credit Card Debt: $22,489.99
Mortgage Debt (House and Land): $96,204.06
Misc. Debt (Car, Medical, In-laws, etc..): $14,117.30

Total Debt Accumulation: $132,901.35


And now, 9 months later...

Credit Card Debt: $16,064.73
Mortgage Debt (House and Land): $94,190.88 (sad, isn't it?)
Misc. Debt (Car, Medical, In-laws, etc..): $9,873.94

Total Debt Accumulation: $120,149.35

We've paid off almost $13K in 9 months!! WOOHOO!!! Now, we have about $2K in debt for the business that I have not included, but hopefully the photography business will take care of most of it. On top of that, we started sinking funds in January for saving money for different things.
Our Sinking Fund categories are: Car Repair, Medical Expenses, Home Improvement, Luke's Blow Money, Clothing, Holidays/Gifts, and our $1K Emergency Fund.

We have contributed to them as planned so far this year, and we even bought new to us tires for the car in cash. Right now, we are planning a vacation to Florida because Luke's cousin is getting married, and he will be doing the photography. So for now, my paychecks are going straight into a vacation savings so we can pay for the vacation in cash.

We are planning on doing yardsales again this year, and selling some bigger items on craigslist or ebay to hopefully bring in some extra cash for our debt snowball (Dave Ramsey style). I am putting any babysitting money into our Emergency Fund to get it to $1K as quickly as possible as well. (For Dave Ramsey people, we are doing baby step 1 and 2 at the same time). I am also saving up cash to get a few trees cut down this spring, and we are contemplating on how to go about putting up a fence and what the costs would be. We now realize that realistically we will be stuck in this house for a few years yet, and a fence is a must have with the "kind of neighbourhood" that we have :(

We just got our tax refund today, and I paid off a credit card, leaving only 2 left (3 if you count the business expense), so we celebrated by getting chinese food at Asian Wok for lunch. Hopefully, we can continue to be a bit frugal (we've cut cable tv quite awhile ago), and I need to get better at meal planning.

Oh, and a bonus to me working part-time, although I hate to leave the kids. It is close enough to walk to, and since Avery stopped nursing in December, I've lost between 10-15 pounds :) (For everyone that says breastfeeding makes you drop weight, you are all liars to me!!)

Moving Along...

We decided to put a bed rail on Lexi's bed. She sleeps in a the bottom bunk, and Lilly's bed is a trundle on the floor, and 2 of the 4 times Lilly has had a night terror, we have found Lexi in her bed. It worked for 2 nights, but then last night we think Lilly had another one, although Luke had her calmed down in less than 5 minutes. Hopefully this really is helping...

Avery has her one month appointment tomorrow afternoon, so I will update with all of the details later tomorrow.

Luke sold a camera and lens, so pretty soon our first credit card on our snowball will be paid off!!! We are awaiting our tax forms which should be coming between now and the beginning of February, so we can start that process. I'm not sure what our numbers will be since that Obama tax went into effect, giving more back in each paycheck, and we had Avery, so our tax return is a mystery number for us right now.

I'm trying to put us on the envelope system for groceries, dining out, home improvement, and thrift/gift savings. Hopefully having the cash on hand and seeing it disappear will help keep us on our budget a bit better.

I pulled both of our credit reports from annualcreditreport.com. I pulled our Experian reports, and we can pull from the other two throughout the year. All for free since we aren't getting our score with them. I am going to start working on our "Everything Important" binder again. I haven't touched it in over a year, and it has important information in the event that Luke and I both died, people would know where to find our login information, credit details, work information, insurance information, and a listing of valuables and whatnot.

That's about it besides the normal housekeeping...

Financial Goals for 2010

We know we have accumulated way too much debt over the past couple years (a few kids, a miscarriage, buying a car, and having a money pit for a house doesn't help). I am tired of the stress it causes me (I stress about everything), and it's getting to the point in life where we need to get our stuff together because Lexi and Lilly are getting to an age where they will remember things that happen, and I don't want them to remember a bunch of negatives in life. We are going to loosely follow Dave Ramsey with our debt snowball. We also need to make our credit look as good as possible, because our land loan will require a balloon payoff next in April 2011 (It was supposed to be a loan that wraps into a construction loan to avoid that balloon). We will have to find a way to get a loan to take over that loan so we can keep our land (where we will build one day), so we can't mess up our finances this year! Here is our credit card debt list in the order we would like to pay them off. (I am doing a combination of small balances first and higher interest rates first)

Debt as of December 31, 2009
$602.52 FirstMerit 11ish%
$808.74 Circuit City/Best Buy Chase 0% until Nov 2010
$4,323.59 Luke's Bank of America 16ish%
$4,192.29 Holly's Bank of America .99% until June 2010, then 10ish%?
$3,912.64 Luke's Discover
$7,415.67 Luke's Chase
$21,255.45 Total Credit Card Debt End 2009


The First Merit card will be paid off with e-Bay proceeds from camera gear Luke is going to sell. He is putting them on auction starting the 7th, so hopefully by the end of the month that balance will be gone, but that card will be kept live since that is our overdraft protection card from the bank.

The Circuit City turned Best Buy card is the remaining balance on Luke's a700 camera. It is 0% until November, but since it's such a small balance compared to the other cards, it is next to go. I hope that a bit of extra from the e-Bay sales, combined with craigslist selling, babysitting money, and some odd job money will get that card taken care off by the end of March. That card will then be canceled, because we don't need a Best Buy card.

We aren't sure what our total federal tax refund will be this year. I had Luke up his allowances to they took out less, then that Obama tax thing took out even less than what we were claiming, but we had a baby as well, and I'm pretty sure we are considered dirt poor now by the government, so we will get at least what was put in, even after claiming Chris' rental income. Dave Ramsey suggests a $1000 starter emergency fund, but we never made our shuttle vacation last year, and this year NASA is planning on retiring the current shuttles, so here is my plan.

Put $500 into savings for the emergency fund. Give up hope on getting tickets to the NASA Causeway to be as close as possible to the shuttle for launch, since the tickets are in such high demand this year, we will be lucky to even get them. We also won't be tied to a specific launch that may get delayed again and again, since tickets are good for the launch mission, and not the date. Plan trip as cheapily as possible for a possible Florida shuttle launch vacation, seeing the launch from Titusville or Cocoa Beach, and renting a BIG A** lens for Luke's camera. Hopefully we get enough back in taxes to cover the trip in full, but this is one thing we have both agreed that we can charge, because we are space buffs and this is our last chance for this to happen. I haven't come up with an as cheap as possible scenario yet, but I am going to start working on it.

Anything that may be left over in taxes will hit his Bank of America card next. It's not the next lowest balance, but it's the highest interest rate card we have, and I want it gone. I am planning on pulling both of our credit reports soon, and I am going to pick some credit cards that we can close and cancel as we pay off. Not sure if this one will stay open or not, but I will detail that after looking over the credit reports.

Any extra money coming in from the photography will hopefully get split between Uncle Sam, the business, and debt. Any extra money from babysitting, odd jobs, and selling our stuff will mostly go to debt. If it's an odd job Luke did, he will get a portion of that money to put towards camera stuff for the business. It will help keep him motivated to sell things.

All of this while trying to find money to put towards the house will be a nice challenge (the budget allows $50/month for house fixing). I'll have to post a finalized budget, but I think I may hold off until the beginning of February, after these e-Bay auctions and whatnot.

Good Luck to us!

The Budget...UGH!

Our budget for January is trashed! Between the busted washer pipe and wire problems, to buying a bunch of photo props for Claire’s shoot, to just impulsively buying way to much fast food and junk, we really screwed up this month. February will have to be the new January, and we will either sink or swim, so let’s hope we get it right this time. We didn’t get to put anything into the Emergency Fund, except for my last paycheck from K-Mart, which was about $76. Our home improvement fund was emptied, and we stole from the thrift and medical savings to help with the cost of the wiring. We went up to the outlet mall in Lodi and spent money we didn’t really have on a few shirts and Christmas dresses for the girls, since they were having a huge clearance sale. This month was just a mess. Luke also spent some money, getting a Maxxum 9, the best film camera Minolta ever made. It's a professional grade camera, and it came with 2 lenses Luke can use on his digital camera as well. So, on we are into February. Hopefully by the end of February, we will have something rock solid in place.



Accounts as of 1/31/09

Emergency Fund: $229.53/$1000

Thrift Savings: $0.00

Medical Savings: $0.00

Home Improvement Savings: $0.00

The minimum on the WAMU card dropped this month, so the new minimum will be $35. We needed that little extra, we had too many runs to Drug Mart this pay period. The price of convenience I guess. I didn’t pay any extra to any of the cards. I decided the best place to put extra cash for now is in the Emergency Fund, until we get to that $1000.

On another note, our snowball has been re-ordered. I'll need to redo the chart and post it, but we got a good promotion on one of Luke's empty credit cards, so we are doing a balance transfer, to get rid of my Bank of America card. It looks like one of the highest interest cards we have a balance on is Luke's WAMU, and it is also one of the cards with the smallest balance. That will now be the first credit card we pay off.

Luke has a bunch of e-Bay auctions going on this week. He is trying to raise money to buy a 100-400 APO lense for his camera, along with a 2x teleconverter. He is hoping to hit a few more air shows this year, and these 2 items will really help him achieve the close-up shots he wants to pull off.

We should be filing our taxes shortly, but all money we get back will go into savings for our upcoming shuttle vacation. I will post lots of details about that vacation plan at another time. Right now I need to get the motivation and make Luke sit down and help with pictures so I can update this blog with all the other life happenings that have been going on. He is working from his brother's today, but hopefully late tonight we can get some things posted.

There are also some new pictures on the photo blog. Claire's newborn photo shoot, and some of Lexi for her upcoming 3rd birthday next month!!

Debt Snowball and Emergency Fund

As for the budget, I really want to follow Dave Ramsey’s baby steps for the Total Money Makeover. Baby step #1 is a $1000 emergency fund, and baby step #2 is debt snowball. Right now we have $152.12 in there (since the car broke and we spent $300 on springs and lower ball joints and a tire). I also have another $50 to put towards it right now from Christmas. I hate paying a little above minimums and that is it on the credit cards, but we would need to do that for another 2 months to get us to our $1000, depending on what my paychecks look like. I will post the table of our debt snowball, but I’m not sure if we will put that much to our first credit card in line, or if we will do the minimum and put the money towards our E-fund. I have to think about it and talk it over and crunch numbers, so we will see. FYI, we keep our Emergency Fund in a Capital One Money Market account. It gets better rates than a normal savings account through our local bank, but the money is still liquid enough that we can access it instantly if we need the funds. It has a debit card and a checkbook, and we can do online transfers that will take a few days to clear.

We have 5 credit cards in our debt snowball, and I have them listed in the order we hope to pay them off in (higher interest rates first). We are also going to start paying Luke’s dad $200/month starting in January for the land loan he gave us (4 ½ years ago)! We also have $50/month for home improvement, $50/month for medical savings, and hopefully $20/month for thrift (which will be a savings for this coming summer’s yard sales). Then we have our usual bills, mortgages and a car payment. I’d like to try and follow the budget as closely as possible for a month or two before I post every amount of expense we have, but I’m sure I will post the entire budget sometime in 2009, to show our progress and help inspire others. As it stands right now with the current figures, it seems as though it should take us around 2 years to pay off these 5 credit cards.

My plan for now is to post our debt snowball table at the beginning of the month to show our goal, and then at the end of the month, repost it with the actual totals to see if we met our goal…or hopefully exceeded it!

Credit Card	Minimum Payment	Projected Payment	Actual Payment	Balance as of 12/31/2008
Holly’s BoA	$110.00	$300.00	$-	$4,176.20
Luke’s BoA	$80.00	$80.00	$-	$4,798.05
Luke’s Chase	$180.00	$180.00	$-	$8,493.16
Luke’s WAMU	$65.00	$65.00	$-	$1,502.77
Luke’s CC	$30.00	$30.00	$-	$1,114.74
Total	$465.00	$655.00	$-	$20,084.92

Time Table	Months	Years
Minimum	43.19	3.60
Projected	30.66	2.56
Actual	0.00	0.00

Emergency Fund: $152.12/$1000