This has been one of the hardest, most rewarding, emotionally confusing years of my life, and this post is so all over the place that it reflects just that. We were able to make more progress this year alone than I'd done over the past several years, but it came at an emotional cost having had to handle everything solo while my husband was gone. On the plus side, our relationship is as strong as its ever been and it really feels like we're a team when it comes to the household as opposed to me running the ship.
We've kind of gone off the rails in December, but I'm not going to let it get me down. I'm looking forward to starting 2020 with renewed zeal towards debt payoff. Here's a few things that we've been dealing with this last few weeks: extreme holiday spending (even with the $1200 Christmas spending we'd saved up through the year, we still went way over...), a road trip (we took a trip to Boston to visit friends), a new puppy (on the way back from said road trip, we stopped to look at a puppy and ended up coming home with him), a sick puppy (turns out that he was getting over a stomach bug which took a very expensive vet visit to identify and resulted in a coned puppy with tummy stitches), a sick household (that stomach bug turned out to be contagious across species...just our luck...victims were the male cat, me, my brother, my other brother who came to help, our son, and then several family members who decided to still risk Christmas at our house despite our warnings), shocking news (it's still really early days, but it looks like we are expanding our family again in 2020), and other changes (in the midst of everything, we decided to wean my son, so we had to deal with my hormones and his adjustment to full formula feeding).
We've added a few big expenses to the budget including the car payment, daycare, and additional animal expenses. But my husband received some good news when discussing his return with his company. He got a small raise that would have been his normal raise during his annual review. He's also been designated to head up a program that is in development. If he does well in the role, he will promoted into it when it becomes an official position in July.
2020 is shaping up to be just as crazy as 2019, but I live for the crazy wonderful ride.
In terms of debt payoff, our first priorities will be catching up the credit card and finishing one of my student loans. We have almost $1300 in our EF, but I chose not to touch that in case we need cash on hand for something else. Instead, I'm going to accept responsibility for our overspending and underpreparedness (not having extra money set aside for the new pup) and spend 2 months getting the CC back on track. I had hoped to finish off the big student loan this year, but it'll be done in January ($225.22 left). That'll free up the $170 monthly payment to go to other things. I think I'd like to split it between beefing up the EF more and paying off the next CC. After I catch up the CCs from this month's spending, we'll have 2 remaining cards totaling about $18k. I seem to do better when I have small milestones, so I may do some balance transfers to knock out smaller amounts.
2019 Reflection and 2020 Planning
December 31st, 2019 at 02:40 pm
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