End of July Update

Well, we have nearly reached the end of July, and I have put off making this post until I could see what our actual total was after the bonus payment for the month. The updated graph is showing nice progress. Of course, it would be nice if it was moving FASTER, but I will just have to wait til next month for that. 

Unfortunately, the whole car insurance renewal kind of threw us for a loop this month. Everything was paid on time, but I still haven't managed to put anything toward my $350/month savings goal. I know!!!! I'm really worried that it isn't going to happen this month. :(  On the plus side, I did pay off the balance on the credit card that I created last month from my lawn supply shopping. So, I guess it's a good thing, although that $200 could have gone to savings instead. 

I do still have one paycheck from my job coming in a few days, so that may be our one saving grace. I still have one bill to pay by the first of August, and this will be my only chance to do that, but if my check is over the $450 mark I will probably be able to pay that bill and put at least $250 into savings, which is better than nothing at all. Just have to wait and see, of course.

On a high note for the month, my raise went into effect as of July 21st!!! I only managed to jump one rank instead of the two they had predicted for me, but I will be up for review in another 6 weeks, and things are on track for me to make the next rank then. *Fingers crossed!*  

Once again I had an awesome shopping trip for this paycheck and managed to only spend $110 and bought enough food to get us through three weeks. A lot of fantastic deals that I just could not pass up, and we are starting to get a little bit of a stockpile for once, instead of having only one option the day before payday. It's a nice feeling!

My last post talked a bit about our loans going on In School Deferment. In the past this has only worked for about 50% of our loans due to paperwork issues. This time, surprisingly, all of our loans went on deferment! I am still a little perturbed by this because it makes things a bit more difficult to figure when it comes to all the different payments and interest, etc. However it does allow for a new option: We were paying a total of $594/month toward student loans up until this month. I am going to round this to an even $600. Plus the $100/month bonus payment. SO I now have the option of applying $700/month to a single loan without making any payments on the other loans. This is good and bad because some of the other loans are unsubsidized and will accrue interest pretty rapidly. On the other hand, I will be able to pay off the smallest loans in just two to three months each, which is a HUGE motivator!

Now, it is time to see how disciplined I can be. The problem with not having required payments on all of these loans is that the money is technically free to float around in my account until I put it toward something. It is going to take a lot of willpower to use that money for these loans every month instead of buying a new couch or a new car, or pretty much anything else in the world that I could think of to spend it on instead. I am really really hoping I can pull this off through sheer determination. 

Another issue that has come up lately is how we are going to be able to pay Jason's parents $200 a month starting January 1st. We have discussed the possibility of only paying $200 a month toward our student loans, and paying them $500 a month for the next few months until the first of the year in order to get a head start on that. It is $12000+ that we owe them, and it will take two full years to pay them off even at $500 a month without accounting for the 6% interest that they charge us. Once again, we are considering ways to maximize our income and just get this off of our plates so that it isn't weighing on us and becoming a source of family drama. So far, no real decision has been made. However, we have determined that whatever portion of our tax return does not go to the closing costs on the house will go to them instead. This may be a disappointingly small amount of money, but over time this one debt has come to be a much larger burden than we had anticipated, and it needs to go away soon! Unfortunately, that will also push out our goals for our student loans by quite a bit. 

It is all soo frustrating. I swear I will start making decisions soon. 

A Week of Unplanned Changes

We are nearing the middle of July. I can honestly say that I am starting to panic a little bit right now about our budget. The numbers say we haven’t gone completely off course, but my mind is telling me something else. Jason’s first paycheck of the month was a little bit lower than we expect during our summer “busy season”. It wasn’t a huge hit, but it came at a bad time. Simultaneously I had almost a full week off of work during the week of July 4^th because we have very few clients around holidays. I have not yet seen my first check of July, but it is coming tomorrow. I don’t expect much.  And, of course, I realized at the last minute that our car insurance renewal is due August 1^st instead of September 1^st as I had previously thought, which left me only one month to come up with the extra $500.

So here I am today, looking over everything. Luckily with the money left over at the end of June from my final paycheck I did manage to pay quite a bit of the bills for July. Our rent was already paid out of savings since we had set that aside for the move anyways. I paid all of our student loans in advance, except for the AES loan. Pretty much anything that was due in the first half of the month was paid by the first week of July. Jason’s paycheck came on the 6^th and we have been steadily dwindling away what was left of it. I paid the first half of August rent ($375), the phone bill, the remaining Xcel bill from our old apartment, set-up fees and 1^st month of internet here at the house. Plus there was groceries and gas money and babysitting. As of today we have $167.74 in checking. Whew.

Tomorrow my check comes in. I am only expecting about $290. Of course, my checks are usually a little bit higher ($20-30) due to our incentive bonuses and travel time. But I really don’t want to start depending on the money that I don’t know I’ve earned. So if I take $150 of this week’s leftovers and add it to my paycheck tomorrow I should have about $450 to put toward insurance. Now, to be clear here, I could always just pay the insurance in installments, but it would cost us $150 extra over the next 6 months. I like my discount for paying in full and it is one less thing that I have to worry about on a monthly basis.

Anyways, I still have not seen the water bill for the month, and I have yet to see a gas/electric bill for the house, and that is why I am starting to panic. I have actually been trying to revive our lawn and garden which has meant a lot of time with the sprinklers running. We picked up an AC unit to cool upstairs, and we only run it at night when we are getting ready for bed, but I still have no idea how much that is costing us.

It is also worth mentioning that a strange turn of events with our school paperwork has led to some of our student loans going into ‘In-School Deferment’. I had anticipated that we would have loans do this, but for some reason the AES loan went into deferment this time, when it had previously been ineligible to do so last semester. On the flip side, some of the loans that went on deferment last time did not do so this time. I don’t know why this happens, or what the deciding factor is. I’m pretty sure it is a matter of people sending the paperwork to only one or two of the lenders instead of all 3 or some other form of mis-communication. This brings me to a cross-roads with my debt journey. The AES loan being on deferment saves us $230 a month, but at the same time interest is accruing at a rate of ~$155 a month. We have been making payments on this loan for several years and have not even touched the principal yet, so it is almost gut-wrenching that the loan is back on deferment and we still are not making progress.

I have to make a decision. I have no intention of just pocketing that money. It will still be applied to the loans, but I can continue to make $230 payments on the loan as normal, and will make progress on the loan slowly and steadily. My other option is to lower my payment to only cover the interest each month, and apply the remainder to my current snowball on my first loan payoff. I am really, really torn here. I refuse to let any more interest accrue on that loan and remain unpaid. I am desperate to see some difference in the principal, however small. The first option means that our first loan payoff will not happen until July of 2013, but the amount of the AES loan will drop from $26,700.06 to $25,806 in that 1 year period.  The second option will allow us to pay $75 extra on our primary loan payoff each month, which means that the first loan will be paid off in March of 2013, but the AES loan will only drop by about $4 over that 8 month time period. In either case the AES loan will wind up being paid off at the exact same time, so that really isn’t a factor. I just think it would be nice to start seeing some bigger numbers come off of the smaller loans, and really start to watch the loans go away in the much closer future.  There is a third option, I can take the full $230 payment from the AES loan and apply it to the current loan payoff, which is soooo very tempting. It would mean our first loan would be paid off in November of this year, and our second loan would be paid off in March of 2013. That is two loans paid off by the time we get our tax return next year. This will be a pretty big boost for Jason’s credit score, and a huge bonus when it comes time to apply for the mortgage because our debt-to-income ratio will be much better. On the downside, the interest on the AES loan would be totally out of control in no time. Once again, it really would not affect our ultimate payoff for the AES loan at all, but just the thought of that untouched interest accruing makes me nervous. I must decide. 


I also have not dealt with that payment on the credit card yet, now that I made the mistake of nearly maxing it out again with all of the supplies for our yard. And I have yet to set aside the $350 for savings and $100 for the monthly bonus payment on the loans. Oi. Things are going to be close this month I think. 

Bi-Weekly Grocery Trip

I just wanted to post a few images today of my grocery shopping receipt from yesterday afternoon. As I said   before, my goal is to keep my bi-weekly shopping trip to less than $125. This week I came in at $120.79.

In this trip I managed to pick up 4 12-packs of soda. I know that I am trying to cut back on it, but generally when it is on sale Jason and I each pick up 2 of our favorite kinds. This just means that mine have to last me longer. I also got gummy snacks for Logan, which I almost never buy, and Pop-tarts, as well as some granola bars for him for breakfast. The kid does not like cereal, otherwise that would be a much simpler solution. Logan also got some string cheese and crackers for snacks. Keeping a variety of snacks and breakfast foods in the house is mandatory to avoid his little nuclear meltdowns, and to prevent him from getting burnt out on any one thing (ie. cereal).

As far as dinners go I picked up some little packets of burrito materials. I had never seen these before, but they are made by Old El Paso and they are with the taco shells. They are just little packets that can be microwaved and put into tortillas or taco shells. They had a few flavors and they were BOGO, so I gave it a shot. Hopefully they don't taste like cat food. But if they happen to be edible and as easy as they look, they may become a staple for us, since I know that the key to us not going out to eat is to have readily available dinners on hand. These only take 60 seconds to microwave, so that is even faster than the time it takes to go through the drivethru.

I also took a chance on a few new kinds of boxed dinners, just add chicken. I maintain the fact that we are not going back to Hamburger Helper. There are so many other boxed dinners that are actually really yummy. I won't say they are gourmet, but they are definitely more exciting than noodles + hamburger + random sauce. This week I am trying a Sweet & Sour chicken meal made by La Choy. Once again, I can only hope that it tastes decent enough to make me want to buy it again. And of course, we stocked up on Mac & Cheese, both the Kraft variety and the Velveeta kind. Logan doesn't mind eating the Kraft stuff for lunches and it is cheap. However, for family meals, Velveeta's family size of shells & cheese is much tastier, and makes more. I also cheated a little bit and picked up a frozen lasagna for $7 and a Voila frozen meal for $5. The Voila meals come in two sizes. The smaller size is about $4.50 normally, or as high as $7 when they aren't on sale, and it really isn't enough to feed more than 2 people. But they just came out with a family size that is WAY more than enough to feed us. We have leftovers every single time, and since they are new they are on pretty good sales right now down to $5. It looks like they are normally priced at about $9 without a club card. Unfortunately I have only seen them in Safeways. I have not been able to find the family size at Walmart or Target to date.

In the meat department yesterday I managed to track down the clearance section which didn't have a whole lot in it, but I still made a few good picks. Sirloin and blade steaks were on clearance for 50% off, and were on a club card sale as well. So I paid $5 for one package of steaks and just less than $2 for the other one. Bratwurst were BOGO, pretty typical for the summer BBQs, so I got a couple different kinds of those for only $5.49. The only really expensive purchase in meat was pork chops. They had gigantic packages of chops that were only on a small discount, but I went ahead and picked one up. It ended up costing me $15.31 for the whole thing, but they are 1 inch thick bone-in pork chops, and I was able to separate them into 4 bags of 2 chops each once I got them home. So when you look at it as 4 meals, the average was only $3.82 per dinner. Logan doesn't eat a whole lot so I just share mine with him normally and we have more than enough for everyone.

I also managed to make a discovery yesterday at our new Safeway store, which our old store did not have. Clearance Seafood!!! Now, Jason isn't particularly fond of seafood other than shrimp and lobster, but I still picked up a few things that I was not expecting at all. A half pound of fresh medium sized shrimp only cost me $1.96. A pound of fresh crab meat only cost me $1.80, and a single serving sized salmon steak cost me about $1.75. I'm not sure what I plan to make with these things, but I am super excited to have a resource for seafood again!!!!

So looking back at what I picked up I have a total of 16 dinners, which is more than enough to get us through the next 2 weeks. I consider this kind of lucky, because we did get so many pork chops I will be able to spread them out more instead of having to eat them twice a week just to get to the next paycheck. Whew. I picked up plenty of snacks for Logan and restocked on soda while it was at a fair price (any time I can pay less than $3.50 for a 12-pack I consider a good deal. When it isn't on sale it is $6.29, and I refuse to buy it.). I also picked up some blueberries and a big watermelon to take to a family gathering last night, plus a few cans of veggies for side dishes.

I suppose you could say that this trip was a little bit lopsided. I actually did spring for more snack foods than I would normally buy, but we were completely out, and Logan doesn't make it through the day without at least one small snack at some point. Usually when I buy snack food it lasts a long time though. However, I only had to buy 4 cans of veggies because we had a whole bunch of canned and frozen veggies left over from my last shopping trip. Plus, we always have tons of rice and pasta type of things to go as sides as well.

So, now that I have rambled endlessly, here are the two photos of my receipt that I wanted to share:

The photo above shows how much I saved just with my club card, and my total savings from paper coupons. The 50% clearance coupons are in the paper coupons category, and I did not have any other coupons with me at all, so these were all savings that I found inside the store without any pre-planning. 33% of my total bill is not bad!!

This is just showing the 50% coupons on the meat and seafood that were applied. The reduction on produce was for the watermelon because it came up wrong in the computer and they had to manually adjust for the club card price. 

In a Moment of Weakness...

So we have officially moved into the house, and have managed to get most everything unpacked and put away already. We still need to invest in a few more bookshelves and that sort of stuff for organizational purposes, but at least we aren't living out of boxes.

At any rate, I had forgotten to mention that I had made an extra $100 payment on our credit card last month, because my final paycheck was a bit more than expected. So from the $300 limit I had managed to bring the balance down to just the $100 mark. I was super excited.

But then one day I came home from work and looked at our front yard. *Insert dramatic music here* We hadn't done much with the yard since we moved in since we don't have a lot of the tools necessary. With the little bit of extra money from my paycheck on the 29th of June I decided to go ahead and invest in a weed whacker. The thing is, there were big prickly weeds that were as tall as the hand rail going up the front steps. There were weeds devouring our mailbox, and taking over our sidewalk and driveway. I just could not bare looking at it anymore.

Meanwhile, the little bit of lawn in the front of the house was becoming more and more brown as the days went by. I thought to myself that if I could salvage the grass before it was completely dead it would save us a huge headache for next year. So I began watering the lawn. Yet again, I felt horrible about watering the lawn when there were so many weeds that were already out of control and also soaking up this water. So we went to work. With the weed whacker we trimmed pretty much everything in the front lawn, and edged. The yard itself looks a thousand times better.

But I couldn't stop there! Oh no! Then I had to go back to the store to buy a little hand rake (cultivator) because the garden in the front of the house was full of dead weeds and trash and other odd plants that hadn't survived. So I tore all of that out. Then we went back and bought a regular yard rake for all the dead leaves and whatnot that were still in the grass. Plus, we needed weed killer, and a small bottle of turf builder/weed control. And by the way, our shovel was broken so we needed one of those too. And while I'm at it, the garden now looks completely barren, so why not pick up a few baby bushes to fill it in, and soil/potting mix to go with it.

To be fair, all trees and bushes were 75% off at the hardware store the other day so we did get a really good deal. It was mostly the tools that cost us. And we still aren't done yet. We have to go back and pick up mulch still, but that is only $10 for 4 bags, which will be plenty for our little garden, and then some, and won't break our bank any more than I already have.

In my moment of weakness I spent about $150 over the course of the day and multiple trips to the hardware store. All of it went onto the card because my paycheck had already been spent making up the difference from my June savings goal and buying the weed whacker, as well as a GPS for my car.  Again, I don't make all that much money, my paychecks are only a few hundred dollars, which is sufficient to cover my savings goal and the bonus payment on our loans plus daycare, so it's not terribly shocking that my paycheck was gone.

I do feel guilty about putting so much on the card again now that we are on this budget and working toward paying things off. However, after a day of work and 2 days of watering, we are certainly not the worst yard on the block anymore. I don't have to hang my head in shame every time one of my neighbors drives past. And I promise that I will make up for it...eventually...

Unfortunately, my timing for this interferes with another detail that I had forgotten about. It is time for us to renew our car insurance. I thought that we had to renew by the end of August for a September 1st deadline. It is actually August 1st that our current cards expire, which threw a huge wrench into my plans for the month. We do usually pay 6 months at a time because it ends up saving us about $115 over the course of that 6 month period. But my timing is off and now I am trying to figure out how to make it happen this month without touching our savings. Ooops.


On another note, since this week is a holiday I am only working 3 days, which is going to be a pretty big hit to my paycheck. Likewise, our paycheck tomorrow is going to be a bit light because Jason hasn't had very much work these last 2 weeks. I am estimating Jason's paycheck at almost exactly $1200. It isn't the lowest check we've ever seen, but it does hurt, considering the fact that he should be in "busy season" at work, and his normal paychecks during the summer are closer to $1500-1600. We'll just have to juggle things a little bit to make it work.