Financial Recap: April

So lemmee see. This is the spring of procrastination and I fully intend to get it in gear sometime.

As you know, this is month #2 of unemployment and Baby #2 is due anytime. We have had a lot of bills sneak up on us this month so two steps forward and one step back.

Apparently we didn’t receive the notices for our Homeowner’s Insurance renewal (not good when your insurance company has the wrong address) so we had 72 hours to pay over $1100. Thank goodness we are not living paycheck to paycheck anymore as this was a headache due to the short notice, but nothing we needed to panic about. This reduced the amount that we planned to put into savings but at least it is done for another year.

We plan to start adding $100 extra per month to our ING account that we use for property taxes so that we have the money set aside annually for this bill and it doesn’t sneak up again.

So here is how the month ended:

1. Save 6 months of expenses in Emergency Fund. We are flat at 56% due to the homeowners insurance and other bills.

2. Enroll in life insurance for me- I have been procrastinating on this because I hate to have more expenses when we are working so hard to save!

3. Cash only spending. Flunked this as I lost my debit card and never did get cash out. We overspent by $7 on the grocery budget due to using a credit card (gasp!) I have already pulled cash out for May and I am determined to stay on track with this. For me it isn’t the $7 but more the principle of staying on a budget.

4. Save money for renovation. We completed one small project by using coupons such as this at Home Depot and selling a few things on Craigslist. We are planning to enclose our playroom loft to a 4th bedroom this summer so there is a lot more Craiglisting that needs to be done!

We are hopeful that we can finish Goal #1 by September. I can’t wait to start tackling the remains of my grad school loans which will be our final step in becoming debt free. We are deviating a bit from Dave’s program, but with one income and 2 babies, we feel better having the extra money in savings right now.

Also I contacted our mortgage company after reading this great post by Meredith. Our mortgage is currently at 5.75% and after applying for the 123 Refinance program it looks like we might be able to secure 5.0% with no points or fees. We have our fingers crossed that the final paperwork comes through soon as this will reduce our payments by $200/month. If we continue to pay the same payment we will go from a 30 yr mortgage to a 20 yr mortgage. We are still deciding if we want to put the monthly savings into our debt snowball or if we want to continue with the same payments and reduce the life of the mortgage. Apparently we can try to get even lower than 5.0% but we are happy with this refi as we will pay nothing out of pocket.