Kitchen Savings Update

In the middle of my post yesterday I decided to see how the kitchen fund is doing. I had written a pep talk on the realism of kitchen goal in March.

	Goal	Savings
	$20,000.00
Kitchen		$2,231.00
Home  Renovation		$2,184.00
Sky is Falling		$4,900.00
Total Savings		$9,315.00
New Goal	$10,685.00

That’s really exciting! I’ve been saving for quite some time in these accounts so I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve saved $10G in less than a year. Though all the power to you if you can do that!

With 10 more months to go this means that I’m aiming at saving $1,000 in my kitchen fund. I’ve picked up a small side hustle that should bring in some money that can be put there. ML’s got one that will most likely contribute $4,000.

This bring my goal of $1,000/month down to $700/month. While still a bit of a stretch this feels more realistic. I’ve gone from talking about a new kitchen to really feeling like this could be our reality!

Anticipated hiccups:

• Hosting friends for 2 weeks in August
• Multiple summer weddings (showers, gifts, travel, hotel)
• Christmas spending (we always use our buffer here)

I can’t do a whole lot about those but it helps to remember them so I’m not thrown when they occur. This year I’ve been please with how frugal we’ve been.

Here’s to the kitchen becoming a reality!

When Dreams meet Reality

I’ve been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat!  It’s filled with amazing beats, good advice and American History so there’s lots to love. There’s one lyric that makes me think of life after debt:

This has been our life this year! Getting out of debt was our brand new beginning. We were going to do lots:

• Accelerate mortgage payments
• update the house
• get a new kitchen
• save for a new car
• build our emergency fund
• go on a vacation

All of those are great goals but let’s be honest they’re not going to happen at the same time. Once we both got debt free we really had to face reality and figure out what it is we really wanted to do.

While most of our money is going towards the kitchen we are trying to work on the other points as well. This has ended up with me feeling as though I don’t have enough. I know it’s ridiculous so when I heard that line I finally had an explanation!

When I began this blog I thought it would take me 30 months to repay my own debt. I hadn’t even considered helping ML. In less than 2 years we were both consumer debt free. That’s an awesome achievement!  However,I hadn’t emotionally prepared myself for a realistic life after debt.

This year has been a year of learning how to set realistic goals again. It’s also realizing that I still choose not to have money for certain things. Maintaining my consumer debt free life and achieving my goals means that I still have to make choices.

I don’t think I had really anticipated that. Somehow in my dreams debt free meant that I could have my cake, eat it in one sitting and not have a tummy ache. Definitely a fantasy!

The reality is that maintaining a debt free life has been very similar to living with debt. This time instead of me paying the bank with interest, I’ve been paying myself and getting interest.

Which is a pretty awesome way to live. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to redistribute my debt payment so that I can fund my new start.

 

Home Insurance

At the beginning of May I got my home insurance billing notice. It’s a big number  but I’ve been socking away a bit each month for it.

Tiny problem: I under-saved.

Yep, completely did my math wrong and I’m now $180 short of what I need to pay up next month.

I was surprised at how upset I was by this hiccup. It wasn’t so long ago that I was forgetting that this would be due and putting the entire  amount on my credit card. An extra $180 is much more realistic! I can re-arrange my finances so that it won’t affect my budget numbers.

Next step: up my budget as of July in this budget line and remember that I have 11 months to save not 12!