Total spent in September: $340.29
Our $400 spending budget has to cover all groceries, household supplies, personal care products, gifts, 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.
We didn’t have any problem staying within budget this month. Which is why it’s so frustrating to me to not be able to go a bit over one month for some good deals on items we use anyway, since it’s all going to even out. The problem I did have this month is that through 9/25 we’d spent less than $250 of the $400 budget. I saw that as an excuse to loosen up our spending and I bought several splurge foods that we wouldn’t have bought otherwise. The last 4 days of the month we spent nearly $100. Hmmmm – when told (even though told by myself) that I can’t over the monthly budget I seem to take that as a personal challenge to spend it all because we won’t have it to use later. Half of the remaining budget money went to our mortgages and the other half was split between my hubby and I for splurge money. I’ve got to keep working on this strict budget thing to find the balance that will work best for our family!
Between August and September we paid 3 extra principal & interest payments on our house in Arkansas. This month we are only able to pay about 1/2 of 1 extra payment. My husband is on his 14th consecutive vacation day with only 1 potential day of work in the foreseeable future. He’ll run out of vacation next week. I felt we should keep up with the $175 we’d committed to apply extra each month, but not any more until the job situation has improved. Boy it’s scary to think of losing your main source of income!
I’m seriously looking into refinancing our current house. With our current plans to pay off both houses, we only have 11 years left to go, but 15 year rates are just slightly over half our current rate on this home. We could refinance to a 15 year mortgage and only pay $40 more per month. That’s some serious savings- even over our current payoff plan! If you’re thinking about refinancing you might want to read these two posts:
What Are Points (on a mortgage) and Should I Pay Them?
Do You Wonder- “Should I Refinance My Home?”
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