I wanted to share our financial goals for this year not only to share with my readers about how we live but also for accountability, if I write it and publish it, it better happen!!
Here are our goals:
1. Save 3 months living expenses by December 31. We cheated and used some of our emergency fund towards our home, we almost had 3 months saved but decided to borrow from ourselves instead of the bank!
2. Pay $3,000 towards our "small loan". Our home did not have appliances and needed painting, carpet cleaning, air systems cleaned, etc. so we borrowed some money, I can't wait to pay this off and have the mortgage as our only debt!
3. Make an extra principal payment every month. We plan to add whatever we can to the loan in order to get it paid off as soon as possible!
4. Keep all Miscellaneous spending (Medicine, Toiletries, Clothing, Gifts, Everything but food) under $100 a month. We've been doing this a few months now and plan to continue it to stay on budget! With CVS, coupons, and thrift stores this shouldn't be too hard!
5. Sell $500 worth of stuff from around our home by July 31. I actually began this on August 1, 2008 and so far I have sold $113.57 in little stuff around the house such as books and scrapbook supplies! I have $386.43 to go which means I have to sell $55 worth of stuff each month!! I think this will be challenging but since we moved and I am decluttering big time hopefully we will reach it!!
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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3 comments:
Rachel, Seems like great goals and I'm sure you can achieve it! We can do everything with a little planning and His help. :) You are right that writing down our goals help and I'm still trying to find out what I should put on my plan for the year.
Good luck! :)
I like your goal list a lot. Definitely, making written goals and posting them is a great idea.
I would consider one thing about the extra mortgage payment: Rather than making the extra payment, it might be worth while just putting aside the money for that payment into a dedicated account (escrow or sinking fund)for now until you have maybe a year's worth of mortgage payments in cash in the bank. Then if something happens to your income, you know you have a year's worth of money put aside to pay the mortgage, which is a very nice cushion! The thing is, if you make an extra payment and for whatever reason you aren't able to easily pay the next month's mortgage, you don't get to *not* pay next month's mortgage just because you already made an extra payment. I think it is worth considering making it a goal to have the cash available for the payment, but just put it into a savings account intended for future mortgage prepayments, until you have larger cash reserves built up as a couple.
We have discussed saving up money instead of paying towards extra principal. Since our goal is to make only a small principal payment each month (like $100) we are going to go ahead and do that. We do have an emergency fund in place, it is not a fully funded 3 months YET, but we are focusing on building that up, so if something did happen we still would be able to pay our mortgage.
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