February 2016 Recap – $50,000 Paid off!

Welcome!

Each month I review how we did on our budget, whether we made our snowflaking goal, and how much we brought in consigning. That debt is going DOWN.

Big news: We hit $50,000+ of debt paid off!

February 2016 Budget Recap – How We Did

These past two months have been a bit challenging. We went over budget again – a friend came to visit (which we didn’t budget for) so there was some more eating out than usual, we gave extra to a charity (not that it’s a bad thing, of course), our electricity cost more than usual (brrrrrr!), and our slush fund included hair care items (my mom paid for my actual hair cut and color, though, as a birthday present!), another donation (forgot to move it to the charitable category), Girl Scout cookies (we’re selling them, which means we’re also buying them… eep!), and a book for L at some point.

News on the food/grocery front – I am finally… FINALLY starting to meal plan this month. I have resisted it for so long! But I’m actually finding that weirdly… I enjoy it?! Not the planning part, to be honest (though that may grow on me), but the fact that I don’t have to think from night to night about what we will have or need to make. It’s really kind of amazing. Whether we are actually able to save money this way remains to be seen….

Month-to-Month Progress:

The decrease in debt is good, but I sure wish most of my payments on Loans 3 and 4 wasn’t going to interest! They truly have barely budged at all because we’re not paying any extra (the interest rate on those is only 2+% compared to the 6+% on Loans 1 and 2.

How far we have come:

BOOM! There it is!

(Edit: as a reminder, the total debt listed for 2014 is confusing because there is no longer listed all of the credit cards and car loan that we had at that time in this chart – I really need to find a better way of sharing this info, as this makes the math look totally weird.)

February 2016 Snowflaking

As a reminder, our goal for each month is to snowflake at least $239 to pay off H’s student loans by February 2017. (For more on our goals, see this.)

We snowflaked an extra student loan payment of $1,127.06  this month, as you saw in our February  2016 Snowflaking Report. (See the post for more details.)

February 2016 Consignment

• $6.96
• $64.66 (January)

Pitiful, I know – I wouldn’t have even picked up the amount had I not had a whole big load of stuff to bring (thank goodness!). I didn’t think I would have stuff to donate, but I went ahead and found L’s spring/summer clothes and went through them and took some. I also took some clothes from when I KonMari’ed my closet!

Other Money Details

• H has his interview for keeping his job on Monday. Please send your good vibes!
• We’ve got our emergency fund all set up (just in case things don’t go according to plan with H’s job), but we had to dip into our Sinking Fund quite a bit recently to cover the cost of H’s job-related conference expenses. Some of this will be reimbursed (fingers crossed that all of it will be!) but it makes for some tight times, since that left us with very little to work with.
• Another category in our sinking fund that I wiped out last month was our car repair fund. Geez. I went to get it fixed at the dealership because it was a recall (which would have been free) and then they slammed me with this paper that had all of this crap on it that “needed to be fixed.” I let them replace the brake pads on the back brakes (which we knew were going to be a concern soon), but it was still pretty upsetting.
• We haven’t gotten back our taxes from the state yet, but we did get our $1000+ back from Federal government. It is going entirely to student loans, of course! 🙂

We recently had the opportunity to buy a house again… and it really taught me something about my current feelings about our finances! I’m looking forward to writing a post on that soon….