Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!


~Wild Irish Wanderer

More debt payment

This month we paid an extra $200.00 to our debt, It seems like we just are going so slow but I know forward is better then backwards.


We haven't done much of anything but plan to do a overnight trip next month. I already have the money set aside for this..


We are still waffling back and forth on when we should move I prefer to pay things down more but know that my hubby won't be able to finish his college education here where we live.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Paid down

Paid an extra $120 to our CC today I would love to get it to zero by the end of 2016..


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Back

We are back from our family visit and now it's back to work for everyone. I've done the grocery shopping and laundry and now just need to put everything away in the dressers.


I haven't done much with any bills since everything had been paid prior to us leaving, although I will say we paid cash for everything we bought and all expenses and still came home with $500 leftover.  I put that back in our safe for a later date since taxes will be due next year and since I know we will have to be paying taxes I want to save every penny from now on until we find out how much our tax bill will be.


It's going to be a rough next few days here since I work the next 5 days but then I'll have a few off to enjoy before doing it all over again...


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Snowball

Paid an extra $367.00 today.. Got our bill under $5,000 !!!!


I told hubsy I might put more on it as we have $575 in buffer account and that I might just put the $75.00 towards the bill also.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Cash Envelopes

    This paycheck we took out cash for our envelopes, this seems to be working much better in the restaurant area of our budget, as we haven't gone over it yet, but we are only a week in so lets hope!


    I have all our bills paid thru the end of the month except the mortgage which will be taken out with the next paycheck. We have cash in our envelopes for gas for both cars that should last until the end of the month and possibly into next month.  We don't have any trips/hikes planned as the weather is turning rainy and I'm back to working every other weekend, and well as my luck has it the nice weekends are the ones I seem to be working!


    We need to go to the bank and talk about refinancing our home as we'd like to rent it out if/when we move and I'd like to make the payments as low as possible before that happens, if not we'll attempt to sell it and the market for homes just is not selling here right now.


    I still have 13 days of vacation planned next month and at this moment it looks like we will be having a staycation for most of it, but it depends on the weather, we'd like to take a small weekend trip someplace, I'll need to look at groupon/living social to see if they have anything that looks good.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Savings and Bills

  We have been doing pretty good with not spending a lot on extras this pay period, I have been tracking where we spend every penny and every dime that comes in or we transfer from savings. I'm still way over in restaurants and hope to be able to drop this down somewhat in the next month.


  On the down side, our dishwasher died and we had to have a new one replaced. DH and I removed the old one but we just couldn't figure out how to replace it so we had to have someone do it for us. And this was an expense we didn't want to pay new dishwasher + install fees, but we had no choice.


  We did have the money in a home maintenance sinking fund so we did have all the money we needed to pay for this although its depleted and will need to be replaced.


  We also had a pet problem, one of our dogs has bad ears and we had to take her to the vet and $300 dollars later she has medications, ear wash, ear drops and has to be seen again in 2 weeks to see if they all help.


  Thus far it's been an expensive past 2 weeks although we did have money for all of the above in sinking funds, it's never fun to watch all the money sift through your hands and know you have to replace it a little bit at a time....


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Moved money

Monday I moved money from our regular savings into Capital 1 Savings and made separate account for each Sinking fund goal we have. I still kept some money in our regular savings but I think I'll move it all eventually and only keep the money we plan on using between now and January in savings.


I also made a separate account called bills leftover, and any amount left over in our budget that was under spent I'll move over there and save it, when it hits a certain amount say $1,000 I'll use it to pay off some more debt.


We have enough in savings for most any emergency, and now I'll be dealing with my Union and work again relating to some other issues I've been having so I'm not sure what will become of that in the future either.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Update

  I have my temporary crown on now and will need to go back to the dentist in a couple of weeks for my permanent crown, it's a tooth that is visible so it will be porcelain to match the others.


   In other news all of our bills have been paid for the rest of this month except three that are auto deducted out at the end of the month, I've already deducted them from checking anyway just to be safe.


    Hubby and I decided to track every penny spent to see what we are blowing money on since it seems like we never have any money. I did tell him we are not tracking our personal spending money which is approximately $50 dollars each a month.


    Tomorrow we are having out moving budget meeting to finalize the date we want to move, we know it will be after school gets out we just haven't decided on a date!


   Since I'm on vacation this week, I've tried to keep up with the house work and have to keep encouraging hubby to make sure everything is done and stays done on days I work otherwise I have to spend my days off catching up.


I think I've rambled enough :-)


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Broken Tooth

Well today I was eating and a tooth broke off, straight down the middle and I had to go to the dentist who thinks he can save my tooth and just put a crown over it.


An expense I didn't want to make but that is what BEF's are for I guess.


I have to go back tomorrow, next Tuesday and two weeks after that to get the whole thing completed.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Paid Extra...

We paid an extra $70.00 to our next card we are paying off, and although we paid some off we spent money on clothing and fitbits. I have placed a moratorium on spending from either of us.. I hope we can follow it.


School starts in a week and one day, not sure if I can't wait or I'm sad.. My last child is in 7th grade.


Hubby will be taking a class or two this semester. I'll plug away at debt although it looks like I need to make a dream board since I told hubby I wanted to go to Sorrento Italy..


and It's only a dream unless you have a plan so time for me to plan to make this dream come true..


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Weather Changes and updates

Today is our last day of nice weather for about a week and boy do we need it badly, it's fires everywhere and hopefully this will help put them all out.


On another front, I'm still waiting for one or two issues to be resolved from my job and hope to have this completed by the end of next week. Although I doubt it will be that soon I can hope!


We are plugging away at our bucket list and moving dates, at this point we feel June or July 2016 would be a best option for us as traveling in the winter is just not what we are looking forward to with children and animals.


I get paid today so we have bills to pay but I won't be doing that until tomorrow since it's my day off.


Tomorrow is also grocery day, dentist day for DS-Y, meal planning for the next week and grocery shopping for the next week, oh and house work that is to be done that day.


At least I get to sleep in to 6am!!


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Paid Another Off

Today DH and I paid another card off leaving only 3 left to go. We pondered whether we would wait until the next statement came in but decided to just go for it. We still have a moderate amount left in savings and our Sinking Funds are all fully funded. We still have problems with going over budget on food but have been working on it diligently the past month. We have no further current plans to pay anything else completely off at this time as we have moving plans in the next 3 months to 8 months.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Paid one off

Today DH and I paid off one Debt completely, now to just wait for it to post. We are keeping a majority of the money we got in our savings for future projects...


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Extra Money and Extra Stuff

Today I got a large check from my work place for a long issue we have been fighting over. DH and I decided to just pay off 3 bills and place the rest in savings for now. We will decide in the near future if we want to pay anything else off or just leave it in savings for now. I know we will have a large tax debt this year so I've also been trying to work some over time to save for this also. We have approx. $10,000 in savings for this already and since we have no idea how much its going to end up costing us we will just have to wait and see.


In other news, school doesn't start here until September 8th, why so late I'm not sure, but we have already finished our school shopping and only need about 4 more school supply items.


It's been very, very warm and nice here the entire spring and summer and looks like it will be continuing until the early fall...


That's pretty much all that has been happening here for now :-)


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Sitting about the house and finances

Today I'm just enjoying the day. DH took the boys to see a movie so I've had the whole house to myself for about 2 hours. I go back to work Wednesday after a long break. And although I'm looking forward to it. I'm nervous at the same time. DH will be staying at home and taking some college classes for now, although he does plan on getting a part time job at a later date.


We have been working hard on getting our debt down to just 1 credit card, our truck loan and house loan. We are hoping that by August 1st we will go from almost $63,000.00 to $37,700.00 this is not including our house though. We do plan to try to refinance our home or sell it within the next year, we won't know which until a later date.


Starting August 1st, I will be making a list of things we are going to be cutting from our budget to attempt to get more money to pay off our debt. I'm hoping I'll be able to convince DH to cut cable but keep Netflix, amazon prime and look into hulu plus if needed. I'm not cutting or changing our cell phones as we have the grandfathered ATT plan with unlimited text, data and calls and although it's $190 a month for 3 phones I am not able to justify dropping it since we always, always use a lot of data and most of my family and his live away from us.


So this leaves
Cable
Lawn Service
as our options to get rid of..


All of our sinking funds are fully funded at this point, but with school starting soon we will need to move some money to get clothing and supplies for DS-Y.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Issues very nearly resolved

We've had a lot of stuff going on in the past 6 months and hopefully today or tomorrow it will be done with.  DH and I are going to completely and 100% work on getting out of debt including the house as soon as possible. We will be working on our fencing and having our floors replaced then we are putting our house up for sale to move into a smaller place as this one is just way to big for our needs. We have quite a few goals we would like to complete and hopefully we can work quickly on them and move on with our travels.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Hopefully!

Hopefully all the issues that have been going on here at our house will be resolved within the next week or two, then I can let you know how everything has been and what our goals are for the next 10 months.


~Wild Irish Wanderer

Been Awhile but still here

We've been here but haven't posted for awhile. A lot has gone on lately and we are just taking it one day at a time. We might have to move to another state and although I'm all for this I'd rather have more money saved before I do it. But we have to see what is going to happen...

~Wild Irish Wanderer