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Home > Archive: September, 2018

Archive for September, 2018

Take Two

September 28th, 2018 at 12:57 pm

I was going to wait a little longer to post this, but since some of my recent purchases can't be explained without it, here goes...I'm pregnant again!

Yesterday was my 12 week checkup, and I'm due next April. (Fingers crossed!) I haven't really let myself be excited about it, and I've had a pretty rough first trimester, so I'm hoping it lets up soon. Since it's been so difficult, I just kind of leaned into it. There was a lot more eating out than normal since I had no energy to cook, and even if I did, the food aversions were so bad that I couldn't actually look at food for more than 5 minutes before getting violently ill. Once I realized how bad it was, I started buying more convenience food to enable my husband and brother take on more of the load, so we could eat out less. Two weeks ago, my mom stepped up big time. She visited and cooked a week's worth of healthy-ish (certainly better than the frozen stuff) meals. She offered to do that for as long as I need. This weekend, my brother is delivering the next set of foods. Since I have really bad veggie aversions, I tried to think of ways to sneak them in to the meals she's making. The menu is fajita mix, spaghetti meat sauce, broccoli cheddar soup, beef stew, and chicken fried rice.

I can't even be in the grocery store for long without gagging, so DH has been making the trips with me. At Costco last weekend, we ended up with several impulse purchases, including a big one. We bought new potholders and a king size blanket (from the Household budget). We also bit the bullet on our last remaining big purchase for the nursey - a recliner. I knew I wanted a recliner, so we could use it in the living room furniture eventually. Costco had one for $350 that was electric and had massaging and heat options, plus a USB port. The ones I had been looking at were around the same price without the bells and whistles.

For other baby planning, my dad and stepmom had already bought our crib last pregnancy. We'd also bought a dresser before losing him. When Toys R' Us had their closing sales, we went ahead and got the infant travel system, high chair, extra infant car seat base, pack n' play, and bassinet. At this point, I think we're mostly set. I don't want a lot of toys, and we're set on clothes. I don't want to heavily stock up on diapers, bottles, etc. because I have no clue what the little one will actually tolerate or take to.

Obviously, this changes financial plans yet again. More to come on that soon.

Lots of paydays and a trip

September 21st, 2018 at 06:30 pm

Today was essentially 4 paydays - my personal account, my contribution to our joint account, DH's paycheck, and a payment from my brother. It's all been appropriately budgeted out.

One thing I haven't yet mentioned is that next month, my brothers and I are going on a road trip. My dad moved from California to the deep South. It's now about a 14 hour drive to see him, so we hope to go down once a year or so. This year, we timed it for my brother's and our stepmom's birthdays.

I've only budgeted $300 to the trip. We're going to drive straight down in one shot, but break the drive into 2 days coming back. I used my rewards CC free night for the hotel. We're staying with family and will mostly just focus on family time, so the $300 is gas, road snacks, hotel parking, and then a trip to the aquarium on the way back home. The trip fund is fully funded. We also have the money for my kitchen pantry set aside, so I'll probably pull the trigger on that soon.

A Fresh Start

September 20th, 2018 at 02:20 pm

Apparently, my company has 2 financial planners as free resources. They gave a presentation the other day, and I decided to meet with them to get some ideas. They asked me to give them a look at my financial picture, so that they could help me develop a plan. I'm still working out what information I actually want to give them, but it did force me to look at my financial spreadsheet and recalculate debt payoffs based on where I am today and some things that we're anticipating. According to the new calculations and not accounting for raises and bonuses, we should be debt free (except for the mortgage)by the end of the first quarter in 2022. If we push hard and stick to this plan, we may even be able to do it earlier. My 35th birthday is in December 2021. That'd be a pretty nice gift to myself.

Can't wait to free up money

September 18th, 2018 at 02:38 pm

I'm trying to cut myself some slack because we have a lot of things we're juggling right now. I currently put aside about $1250 across 5 goals - Marriott CC payoff, Ashley Furniture CC payoff, fireplace fixing, property taxes, and an old loan that I took for my mom that she just completely stopped paying me on. All of these goals minus the old loan were planned to be completed by the end of the year. Rather than rush to live off last month's income, I'm going to use the $1050 freed up from everything else to pay off the Mom loan (there'll be less than $1k left) in January (if I can't find the cash before the end of the year) which would free up the last 200. That extra $1250 will give us breathing room to up my retirement to 10% and still give us at least an extra $500/month snowball. Looking at the next few months, it looks like Last Month's Income will happen first quarter of 2019. We also won't have $10k for a new-to-us car, but we're going to stay within whatever we manage to come up with (it's looking like about $8k). That'll also free up whatever money we'd been saving to that goal - not sure what the number is yet since October will be the first normal pay month we've had in awhile.

Life's Hard

September 14th, 2018 at 02:12 pm

It's been so difficult adulting recently. On the one hand, our financial situation is probably the best it's ever been. On the other hand, we still have light years to go, so it feels impossible. To be fair, we are not even remotely gung ho about the debt payoff, so I guess that I can't get upset if I'm not actually willing to commit to the sacrifices.

A random list of financial things:
- I moved our baby emergency fund of $1000 out of our checking account and in to savings. (I used to keep it in checking to ensure that we'd have the $1500 account balance.)
- Our checking account saw over $10k for the first time ever which is huge. It's still sitting up that high, but all of the money is accounted for in various YNAB categories.
- I won't be able to make all of my goals for the rest of the year. I know the living off last month's income will be short, and I'm pretty sure the car will too, but I'm still going to try. We'll just find a car within whatever we do have saved. And DH will have one extra paycheck month by year end which will get us kind of close on the last month's income.
- I set up our credit card payments today and realized that if I found an extra $500ish, I could pay off last month's balance on the Marriott card (our main one) and officially move on to riding the credit card float rather than paying interest.
- I also should have an extra $500 coming in from DH, but that might be better funding ahead rather than allocating it to the credit card.