Back to 40 hour weeks.

I've worked 40 hours each week, these last couple weeks.  And it looks like there is more of them to come.  The extra money helps the budget, without it, money is more tight.  Being debt free, we can save for everything normal we save for and pay the bills, but that won't leave much for building the emergency fund.

July ended up pretty good, we started working on our house again.  I really do hate hanging trim.  I don't mind building something, but I hate the small details it takes to finish.  I have started a diet also, so far I have lost 9 pounds in the last month.  I started exercising almost everyday, and have decided to not be lazy and stay busy.  So working on the house in the evenings helps me stay busy.  I have been on blood pressure medication since January.  The doctor told me that exercise would help.  Since I have a check up with the doctor this month, the exercise and diet might help.

We managed to save $739.01 for our emergency fund in July.  That brings us to a total of 4,246.32.  We are almost halfway there.  We also have around $2,090 saved for a vehicle and $1,800 saved for home improvement.  The Vehicle we don't think we'll buy till next year, but the home improvement we are going to use to get the rest of our carpet.  There is still probably 500 square feet that isn't carpeted.  It's slow saving for 3 things at once, but we'll get there.

Back to work.....

Right when I got back from vacation, My job had 5 weeks of 10 hour days, six days a week, and option to work on 7 days a week.   The weather was extremely hot and dry, which made for long days outside working.   At least I didn't have to mow the lawn during those weeks, since my lawn is dead from the drought we are having this summer. 

It is property tax time again.  We saved for the last year for it.  My wife went and paid the first of two payments this month.  We could have paid both, but there was a miscommunication.  So we will pay the second payment next month. 

June ended up pretty good. We had a little over two thousand extra at the end of the month. We split it between emergency fund, car fund, and home improvement fund. This is what my wife wants. She wants to save for all 3 at the same time. Which is going to make baby step 3 take a little while. With the $710.63 we saved, the emergency fund now totals $3507.31. We are now a third of the way to our $10,000 goal.

Summer Vacation

We just got back from our summer vacation.  We have been saving for a vacation over the coarse of last year.  We were able to bring one of our son's friends with us.  It was a fun vacation filled with lots of activities.  It was all paid for in cash, and we actually still have some extra vacation money left over.   We haven't decided what to do with the extra vacation money yet.  Some idea have been discussed, but none are final.

May ended up to be a pretty good month.  We had 5 paychecks instead of the normal 4.  So we had some extra room in the budget.  So we saved some money toward home improvement and the car fund.  We also saved 902.38 toward our emergency fund goal.  We now have a total of $2,796.68 in our emergency fund.  We are one step closer to our goal of $10,000.

Celebrating that we're debt free.

This has been a fun month with our budget. First of all we worked a lot of over time and recieved an annual bonus. This made this months budget over twice the normal budget. So we first paid off our last debt. After that we had to decide what to do with extra money in our budget. We decided to put it in 3 major categories. They were, "The Emergency Fund", "Vacation Fund", and "Home Improvement".

Then we decided to live it up this month. We went and bought clothes for all of us, spending triple what we normally spend in a month. We decided to up our dinning out fund, about doubled it. It was fun live it up a little. It felt great having extra money to play with. I know next month will be back to the normal amount of income in our budget. But we won't have anymore payments except our house payment. It will be great seeing the extra money be put into our emergency fund, rather than being a payment toward our past mistakes. Now that is behind us, and we can start focusing toward our future.

Emergency Fund Goal

We have finnally decided on an emergency fund goal. We took our budget and stripped it down. We took out saving for vacation, new furniture, Gifts (christmas & birthdays), eating out, & home improvement. We came up with around $3300 a month in expenses. We didn't lower saving for Automobile service (fixing the car), pet care, & medical expenses, house insurance, property taxes & gasoline usage. This would still give us flexiblity in our budget.

We looked at what emergencies we might have that we could our incomes and how long they might effect us. We looked at our parents, and their health, their finacial situations. We looked at our jobs and their stablity. We tried to look at any situation that we might use our income and savings, or might cause one of us to take a leave of absence from our job.

We ended up taking the $3300 and multiplied it times 3 months, then rounded it up to $10,000. So we should be okay for 3 months with no income and good for close to 6 months on one persons income. So $10,000 is our goal.

Loosening up the budget.

Now that we are finished with step 2 in the Dave Ramsey plan, we going to loosen up a few dollars in our budget. First we are going to up our blow money by $80 a piece. That gives me and my wife $200 a piece each month. This month we are going to budget in some extra money for clothes. We also got out some extra money for eating out (still using envelope system), we'll see next month if want to leave it higher or not.

We are not making major changes, just a few hundred dollars this month. We'll still have enough to save toward full size emergency fund. We have had a couple discussions on how large an emergency fund we should have. We'll decide soon.

As for now it feels good to be debt free.

We're Debt Free!!!

Friday the 13th wasn't so bad after all.

Today my wife went to the bank today, to pay off our last debt. We have now paid off all our debt except our house. We paid off 49,705.46 in 28 months and 13 days.

It feels so good to finnally reach this goal. But it is isn't over yet, it will never be over, it is now a part of our everyday life. We will still use the envelope system and make a monthly budget. This way of life has helped me and wife communicate so well, our relationship is awesome!

Now it is time for baby step 3, building our full sized emergency fund.

We're Debt Free!!!