Getting Out of Debt July Check Up

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Our $400 spending budget has to cover all groceries, household supplies, clothes and other shopping purchases, as well as home improvement and entertainment.  It’s about a 30% reduction to our spending budget.  My goal is to save enough to cover a trip to Disney World in the spring (essentially we only have to pay for airfare and 1 child’s ticket).  It’s the best time for our family to go educationally and financially, but I only feel comfortable doing it if we can make significant progress on the mortgages too.

When it was time for my mid-month checkup, I tallied up our spending but never finished writing the post.  As of July 16th, this month we’d spent $158.88 of our $400 budget.  I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to make it with the big Target toy sale coming up. But from July 17-31 we spent $180.15, bringing us to a total of $339.03.  Yippee! Nearly half that amount was spent at Target on 7 pairs of new tennis shoes and several toys. Half of the extra $60 went toward the mortgages, 1/4 is my husband’s splurge money this month, and 1/4 is my splurge month for this month which I put into the Disney fund.

So far this summer I’ve been putting extra money onto our mortgages like crazy!  It’s a good feeling to actually see those principal balances dropping by more than $150 a month :-)  Total I’ve dropped about 10 extra payments off the loan on our house in Arkansas.  Keep in mind that’s just the principal/interest portion of the future payments, so it’s not as much as you might think. It’s still good progress though. Part of the extra money has been from our reduced budget, part from reduced childcare expenses this summer, and part from hubby working a lot of overtime. (I don’t sound bitter about that at all do I?)

Right now that gives us a total of $760 in the Disney fund:
$245 in birthday money from all our families designated for the trip
$15 my August splurge money
$500 in reduced childcare costs so far this summer (that’s after subtracting out extra gas costs to go out of town extra and subtracting my babysitter costs) The other $500 in reduced childcare went towards the mortgages just to be fair. :-)

That’s about half the amount we’ll need to save. It will be slower going after this though because the kids go back to childcare/preschool in just a couple of weeks.
Do you have any financial goals that you’re working towards?  

Comments

  1. DonnainOhio says:

    Hi. I love your blog. Do you mind sharing more about saving money like how to budget and stuff and get out of debt. So you have $400/month to spend for everything?is that right? I want to be able to do what you’re doing i just dont know where to start. Thanks in advance.

    My email address is dealsformama@yahoo.com