Good News and Bad News

I finally found some time to sit with my husband and crunch the numbers. We discovered some good things and some bad things. Here they are in a nutshell...lets go with the good first :)

SAVINGS---We have $1060 in our savings right now.

CHRISTMAS- We have budgeted about 750 and have already spent 300...so we have 450 left in our Christmas allocated money.

REFINANCE- We are in the process of refinancing our home. We will go from a 28 year mortgage to a 15 year mortgage...actually since we have ours taken out every two weeks it is an 11 year mortgage. This will cost us about $30 more a month than what we are paying now. When the process is complete we will have one month free of a mortgage payment. That will be a little over $1000 extra. We might leave this in the account to take care of the $30 extra a month we will need to pay out. Or we could put this on our credit card debt....not sure yet what we will do?

OPEN SEASON CHANGES- We discovered that we could save about 1/2 of what we were paying for health insurance. We are switching to one that cost us less and has no deductible. Our old insurance had a $250 person deductible...being a family of 6 this always killed us. Since we are all healthy most of the time...we get stuck paying for everything. My kids would go for their check ups...or one time visit and we would have to pay the whole thing..cause we had not hit our deductible plus the co pays. Even though they would never see the doc again or have any other issues. This insurance requires us to use certain doctors and pay $30 copay per doctor visit. Our family doctor is in the plan so I don't for see that to be a big issue for us. I believe this will put about $200 a month more into my husbands paycheck and I no longer have to stress about paying $1500 dollar deductible each year!


Now for the bad news :(

DEBT: We discovered we owe a little more on our credit card debt than we thought. We owe exactly $4000 after paying our bills. We stuck $1000 on the debt to bring it down..it was at $5000. We could put our savings money on it, but I would rather have the $1000 in an emergancy account. We do plan to utilize skip pay at Christmas time with our credit union...this will give us an extra $700 dollars in December. We plan to apply that to our credit card debt.

So our new goal is to be down to $3000 credit card debt by January and to maintain $1000 in our emergency fund. I might push for $2500. Hmmmmm I am thinking...what else could I sell??

The simple things add up

As a simple homemaker and homeschooling mom to 4 boys, I am limited on what I can do to help us pay off our debts. It is not feasible for me to work a job outside the home when my husband can snatch overtime and make 10 times what I would make working. But still their are ways as a wife I can contribute. The most beneifical way I have found to help the family budget is in the kitchen. This week I worked extra hard at making the most of our food budget. I stocked our freezer by doing a baking day this past Tuesday.

I managed to make 3 casserole dishes, southwestern rollups, 5 batches of pizza dough, and 2 pkgs of cookie dough. I try to spend 2, 3 days a month doing intensive cooking. This not only saves me time and energy in the kitchen..it saves us a bundle of money too! I am not as tempted to eat out when I know coming home from church that southwestern rollups or pizza is ready to go.

I am hoping to make a few more meals tomorrow and I am currently under budget by nearly $60 for our food this week. With my freezer full of meals I hopeI won't need to spend that extra $60!

Scary Mail

Kind of disgusted today. Opened our scary mail to discover our new Visa card from our Credit Union. They mailed us a letter about a month ago saying that our credit union card was switching over from a MasterCard to a Visa and our interest rate was going up from 13.99 to 14.99.

Did we do something wrong? Have we ever gone over our limit? Have we ever made a late payment? NO, NO and NO! So why do they do this...ugh it frustrates me that our government gave these gut sucking companies extra time before the new credit card laws take effect. I knew when they handed out that 6 month grace period these companies would screw everyone over that they could. Are they picking on the people who screw them over? No, they pick on their good customers. The ones who actually make their payments and make them on time. I mean come on! I have heard all the news of the new fees coming our way. You know, the ridiculous ones..such as fees for not using your cards. My husband said this will be our last card. The fees are becoming to scary to keep track of. We are determined that we will be paying it off and building our savings to a decent amount like $10,000. Then cut the puppy up.

I am tempted to apply for a introductory 0% card. Just to transfer this over. Do you think that would be worth it?

P.S. Happy Halloween...we are trick or treating in costumes from our stash...no money spent on this holiday...except for a bag of candy for the treaters. Hope yours is spoookilish!

Budgeting for Christmas

Our house has been full of sick kiddos and a sick momma this week. Needless to say, not much can be accomplished when mom is under the weather too. However, Christmas has been on our minds. I got a few items earlier this summer for the parents so I don't think I will be spending the full amount I have budgeted for them.

Here is a run down of our budget for our family.
DS14 $150.00
DS11 $150.00
DS6 $100.00
DS2 $75.00
Parents $50 X 3 = $150
Brother1= 25
brother 2 =35
Sister-n-law= $35
1 niece= $25.00
Cushion of $5.00

total= $750


We might do some Christmas shopping next week. I have a $10.00 off $100.00 purchase from ToysRus. My two little ones have requested items that are around 50 a piece. Our youngest wants a Fisherprice Castle and our 3rd son wants some giant star wars thing that has wheels. We usually buy our kids just one nice big item and then fill in with 2-3 small items. These would be their one big gift. I am afraid that if we wait too long the items will be sold out. So I might do that next week when they are both 20% off plus use the coupon. We will see how the numbers play out when we do bills before I decide. I am a person who likes to get her Christmas shopping done early and in stages.

Our older children are very involved in Martial Arts. This year they are requesting quite a few things from a Martial Arts magazine they get in their class. Things like gloves, kicking bags, staffs, etc. However, my sons Sifu (teacher) said the magazine offers a discount on Black Friday. So I may be shopping that day online for them.

I am thinking we will save for our emergency fund and fund Christmas by splitting our overages in half until our Christmas fund hits $750. It could work like this...lets say I have 300 left over after bills and expenses. I will put $150 in our savings and $150 in our Christmas envelope. I will write on the Christmas envelope $150. If there are items I purchase during the next week or so for Christmas I will pull it out of the envelope. However, I will stop putting money in that envelope once the numbers written on it have reached 750..not when it is necessarily holding $750. That way I can be shopping for the sales and best deals for the kids. Last year I waited till I had it all saved and found myself scrambling to get a hold of the one or two special things they really wanted. Since my kids don't get a ton of toys I like them to it least get one or two they really wanted.

So what about you?? Are you planning your Christmas list yet? How did you budget for it? Do I look to be spending too much or too little in your opinion?

Selling gold

I have some gold jewelry. Mostly rings with some precious stones in them and a gold bracelet. I never wear any of these. They are not precious heirlooms..and I have all boys anyway. So I am tempted to sell them..but not sure how? Should I go to pawnshops or use those mailers you see on TV, or maybe Ebay them? Those mailers look too good to be true. I keep hearing that gold is way up and now is the time to sell. What do you think? I don't imagine I would get much for these things. Maybe $50-$100 at most. Just now sure which way to sell is the safest and where I might get the best amount of money.

Ray of Sunshine

Despite our nasty plunge into credit card debt and wiping out our savings...we do have some good financial news!

We have decided to refinance our house. We will be going from a 28 year mortgage to a 13 year mortgage! It is a streamlined refi with no appraisal necessary. We lowered our interest rate by nearly 2 points and shrunk our time in debt with our house. I say it will be a 13 years because we have always had our mortgage deducted from our paycheck which comes every 2 weeks. If you are not already doing that you should! That extra paycheck or two really adds up. By doing this refi we will save roughly $190,000.00! Who doesn't like that number!

Our mortgage will go up around $25.00 a paycheck, but that is worth it to us. We will get one month off of not paying our mortgage when this transitions over and we have chosen to leave that money in the bank. Thus...the one month off will easily negate that extra $25.00 payment for a year or more.

My husband was so excited when the numbers came in..he was jumping for joy at the thought of being debt free of our mortgage in as little as 13 years. This has truly motivated us.

Now we are thinking of other possibilities...like really becoming debt free. Our van will be paid off in just one more year. If we start snowballing...who knows perhaps we could get rid of the student loans, car payments, credit card and our house in like 9 years! That would be awesome. You might be thinking I am dreaming and maybe I am ...but who doesn't like to dream big!

Numbers

I really, really, really hate posting this, but this is what people read debt blogs to see! I know you want to see how far off that horse we fell, but I truly do hate posting. Here goes nothing!



Credit Card Debt 2,300.00
Family debt 4,500.00
Student loan 6,653.00
Car 1 10,826.00
Car 2 16,145.00
Total debt: $40,424.00

Savings....a whopping $300.00


I will update my side bars stuff soon.

So you might be wondering what our goals are. Right now we are determined to work on baby step 1 and get our savings up. My husband recently switched to a different department at his job that offers more overtime. So hopefully that will help in building up our savings. We have some things we are trying to sell as well. Other than that we are just socking it away paycheck to paycheck. We really hope we can get to $2000.00 before Christmas. Then we will use some of this for Christmas expenses. Our tax return next year will take care of the debt just like it did last year, and the year before that and the year before that.....do you see the cycle???

I wonder if anyone else gets into this cycle...debt, tax return, debt, tax return??

So there you have it. Our ugly mounting debt staring us in the face. There are a few things that are looking up for us....and I will share that in a later post....stay tuned!