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??
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That's a good reduction in mortgage term!
ReplyDeleteKeep going it'll soon be spring and that debt WILL be gone :-)