Hey everyone – it’s been a quick month of October, and I’m happy to report that everything here has been going well. The initial squeeze that was placed on our finances when switching jobs and seeing a 10x (!!!) increase in health insurance plus my wife beginning work 2/3rds time instead of full time put a fairly sizeable dent in our take home pay (on the order of -45%). The squeeze has lessened, as my company switched health insurance providers and our costs went down, and will go away in january when we move to my wife’s insurance plan (which is paid for mostly by her employer). That alone should put a sizeable amount of cash back into our accounts each month, and will do well once we begin transitioning full-on to the goals that I’ve alluded to previously.
As for the re-design of the new site, that is going swimmingly (yet slowly) and should be done soon. I’ve enlisted the help of a photographer to take a few pictures for the new site, as well as an editor for my free guide on how to cut cable TV. Once all those are back, I’ll make the move to the new site.
In house news, we have finally got a start date for demolition of the wall in our basement, and hopefully that will be wrapped up by thanksgiving. It’s going to be loud & noisy for a while, but I’m certain it will be worth it. I’ll also be able to start working on other projects in the basement once that’s done.
Now, on to the monthly review.
Debt
House
Mortgage $ 106,337 (-$869) Gone are they days where we are knocking this down by just $550 per month, and we are starting to see some real progress here. We had set a few goals related to this note, the super stretch goal would be to have it under 97k by the end of the calendar year, which is unfortunately probably out of the picture at this point. We still can meet our stretch goal of getting this below 100k by the end of the year though, as we should have funds to free up after the health insurance moves around and bonus season comes along. It’s going to be close – and it could happen in the first week of January, but considering we bought this house 2.5 years ago (in may 2012) I’m very happy with where we are at.
Total Debt: $106,337
We are down $869 from last month, which is to be expected. I’m excited that when I’m doing this update, I can simply move the mortgage down to the total debt line instead of adding in student loans, vehicle loans, credit cards and other debts.
Savings
We have moved all of our savings over to vanguard, and instead of putting them in different accounts, we allocated the funds based on a hard number for our emergency fund and a percentage of what is left. Right now, we have our emergency fund in two places: Vanguard Money Market Fund (VMMXX) and Vanguards Total Bond Fund (VBMFX). There have been some suggestions to move a portion of that to a dividend fund, but I’m not too keen on that with the balances where they are at the moment.
House Fund $2,000 – This is lower too for the same reason as the vacation fund. Relying so much on cash flow is a pain, but these things happen. Good news is that we are pausing savings, not skipping on debt.
Vacation fund $1,000 – A dip in this account was cause by our severe cash flow issue (wife’s employer messed up her paycheck last month, so she was paid much less this month), so we had to move a bit out of savings to cover it.
Emergency Fund $10,000 – just the boring old 10k in here. Going to leave it steady at this level for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for reading everyone! How was your October? Did everything go well for you?
Great job on getting your mortgage paid down–wow! Out of curiosity, do you have a high interest rate? Or are you just hankering to be mortgage free? Thanks for sharing!
We bought in 2012, So I’m sure you can figure that out. If not, NO, we do not have a high rate – we are at 3 3/8ths, and we are tossing a BIT of cash at the house note every month because we want to “diversify” (and we are against debt). We know it’s not the smartest idea, esp with the market returning 10%+ ,but it’s what we do because it helps us sleep at night. $200/mo isnt much, and it really knocks a LOT off the principal of the note, esp in the beginning.