Amanda's Life

Well, I suck at updating this thing. We have not really been good this year in debt payoff. We did some more restructuring for lower interest rates but pay off has been slow.

I recently cancelled some bills so we have a little more wiggle room and we’ll see how things go now.

We have had a lot of holidays and birthdays in the last couple of months with still more to come. We also expanded our garden to a MUCH larger size.

Here’s to trying to get back on track!

New year, new chance to pay off debt.

As I am sure everyone can attest, paying off debt while buying Christmas presents is impossible!

We also took a week long trip to Florida so there were costs associated with that.

We had some more expenses when we got home to prepare the garden for a new year and all that jazz.

Now it’s time to see what we can get done this year.

We are very excited to see what we can do in the next 2 years, as we hope to be moving at the end of 2022!

This week we finally finished our bathroom and all extra expenses that came with it!

We saves over $20,000 by not going with our first choice and doing some of the work ourselves. Even paying someone to do one of the bathrooms and the floors in both we saved over that much.

Overall, we probably won’t take on another project like this for a long time BUT, it was nice to do it ourselves and get it done.

We did use credit cards to fund the remodels, mostly because it was emergent considering the leaking of both showers and the need to be able to shower in our own house again. Haha

We also had some electrical surges caused by faulty lines and we had to replace our fridge and we thought our microwave was toast too, turns out it was not working because of the surging but, we are going to retire our 10 year old microwave and replace her anyways.

Our new fridge is actually a nice fridge, the previous one would freeze over about once a year and we would have to defrost it. Not ideal! So, this one is a good brand that should keep us going for a long time, and will go with us when we move.

We will hit our debt payoff hard next month, finally using our stimulus money to help pay off the bathroom remodel, but we will still have some that needs to be paid in the coming months.

All we can do is keep paying off as much as we can and ideally we are able to get everything paid off before we want to move to a new house, hopefully towards the end of 2022!

In the last 2 weeks we have made a lot of really expensive purchases. We were able to get a large portion of the stuff needed to remodel both bathrooms, we also happened to go over several of our budget categories.

We will be starting the work today, the bathtub will be replaced by an actual contractor while the cabinets, sinks, and tile work will be done by us. I had to rent a dumpster since we have SO much tile that will be coming off and need to be thrown our along with the old cabinets, sinks and fixtures.

Next week we will start the demolition and tile work of the other bathroom. All in all, the entire project should cost us around $6,000 rather than the $30,000 we were quoted by “the other guys.”

We cannot wait to actually be able to use both bathrooms again. it’s been about 4 1/2 years since we have been able to use my daughters bathtub. Her bathtub got a hole in it about a year after we moved in and we just never had someone come fix it correctly. Now we will be replacing entirely to make sure we don’t have this issue in the future. The previous tub was fiberglass, the new one is steel.

Our bathroom is already tiled but we believe they may not have backed it correctly, allowing for moisture to get behind the tile and cause problems. This is something we found out about roughly 2 years ago and “patched” for the time being, well, now it needs to be fixed correctly so we can stop patching the grout that has been falling out.

The cabinets were definitely “wants” rather than “needs” but, while I am already demoing both bathrooms, might as well put back in what I want. We will have to sand and stain the existing above toilet cabinets and medicine cabinets at a later date so they match the new chocolate colored sink cabinets.

Well, that’s all for my expensive week. It is now July, this month’s goal is to stick to the budget so we can get this bathroom remodel paid off!

This week we had some grout fall out in our shower… again. So we had someone come out and give us a quote to replace my daughters tub and our bathroom. It was a really high quote. So we had another quote done and will be doing some of the work ourselves which should total around 1/6th of the cost of the other company. We did not really want to do it ourselves but we needed to to cut down on costs by a lot.

We got our mortgage and private loan over payment refunds this week. We also had some extra expenses pop up that we were able to pay cash for with these two refunds. Any time I have an expense pop up that I know will be a recurring thing, I set up a sinking fund to make sure it doesn’t surprise me next time.

We should be getting some nutrients to add to our garden before I get to start planting for fall next weekend. This weeks project will be to pull all the old plants out since their growth has been incredible stunted.

We shall see what happens!

We haven’t really had a whole lot going on debt wise so far. We had to change our strategy to paying off debt in a month. What we had been doing was budgeting out the month, leaving any extra in a “snowball” category in YNAB and then at the end of the month, whatever was leftover would go to an extra debt payment. This basically gave us the excuse to spend more than we had Budgetted in most categories.

So from now on we will be leaving ourselves a $150 “life happens” buffer. We will be paying anything over this toward debt and if anything comes up, we’ll have to move some money out of our sinking fund categories.

I am sick and tired of paying off debt. Spending above what we budget for just for the heck of it is making our debt free journey take longer. We want to get out of debt ASAP.

At this point we are still waiting on the final payment to come for the car that was totaled. Our GAP coverage basically said that they are not paying anything BECAUSE when we call the dealership to get our warranty refunded, it will overpay the cost of the car. If they’re talking about our extended warranty, we passed the miles on that thing a couple of years ago so I’m not sure it can be refunded but I assume in order to appeal their decision, I need to get it in writing that we won’t be getting that back because there are too many miles on the car.

Once I am able to get that from the dealer, hopefully today, then I will send it over to GAP and request they appeal the decision.

Once all of that is finalized, we will be down to just my student loans and the car loan on the new car to pay off with the debt snowball!

This week we finally got the funding from our cash out refinance. We were able to pay off all of our credit cards, we were also able to throw a considerable amount towards my student loans. I closed two of the store credit card accounts, and we applied to have one of our cards switched to a higher cash back percentage product.

We should be finalizing what we need to to get the Nissan paid off with our GAP coverage. I am just waiting on documents from the lender in regards to final payoff number and a copy of the check from the insurance company.

I reworked the budget and debt payoffs to reflect the MUCH lower minimum payments, I will use the difference from what our minimum payments used to be to what they currently are as a snowball payment every month. Any additional income we have will be used as snowflake payments since the amounts are inconsistent.

The last couple of months we have gotten in a bad habit of eating up our snowflake payment with extra spending that doesn’t need to happen. We are going to change up how we do things. I am going to budget $150 each month to a “stuff happens” category, the balance will rollover each month if unused, but our “extra” debt payments will be made at the beginning of the month, instead of the end of the month where they could possibly disappear before the end of the month.

This month we did have a couple of known expenses, we had hubby’s birthday which we usually spend a good chunk on our own presents, and then Mother’s Day where we also spent quite a bit. The rest of our snowflake was eaten up this month making the raised garden beds I had been wanting for a couple of years. Assuming these actually grow things, we will be saving a lot on produce in the next couple of months. Also, we had been giving a lot of wood from my in-laws so that part of things was free, we just had to pay for the soil, compost and seeds.

With our minimums (no additional snowflake payments) we are on track to have my student loans and our new car paid off in 2 years. With additional snowflakes we should be able to get it done sooner. We cannot wait to finally have these things paid off but we are SO excited to be down to only two things, even if it meant maxing out the debt against the house. We will be saving a FORTUNE in interest. Once these are paid off we will be looking to sell and getting onto our “dream” forever property.

Here’s to changing things a little to hopefully make a lot of progress!

Finalized our house refinance this week and also built and planted some raised vegetable garden beds. We are super excited to grow our own food!

Still waiting for our mortgage refinance to complete. My husband was in a car wreck Friday night so we should find out this week if the car is totaled out or if they’re going to try and repair it. Then we’ll have to go car shopping cause he has to have a car to work.