Amanda's Life

This was not a big week for debt payoff BUT it was the week that I get my mid month paycheck and commissions. We also got the surprise of our taxes being deposited into our account. That might have been last week… either way, my next month category WILL be fully funded this month with a considerable snowflake category for March.

We basically use our snowflake as an “oopsie” fund until the end of the month. I want to keep a small cushion each month to ideally avoid going into more debt by needing to put something on a credit card.

Also, my car battery died again this week. If it is the battery going bad, we bought a 5 year battery a year and a half ago so some of that should be able to be reimbursed when we buy the new one.

This coming week has the bulk of our large debt payoff payments for the month so there will be a lot of money leaving our account.

Hope everyone is having a good February!

This month my car was due to get the inspection and registration renewed. I had to take it into the shop to get some issues fixed so it would pass. This caused a dent in our funds but, hopefully everything is fixed. I had a couple of debt payments happen but, just minimums.

We will be making our snowflake payments at the end of the month after making sure that there isn’t anything that comes up that will require those funds. Otherwise, anything above and beyond our normal bills will be going to pay extra to debt. January was a low income month after taking a week off work to visit family so this should be the lowest snowflake month of the year.

Here’s to another week!

Well, I finally took the time to kinda straighten out the YNAB situation I messed up a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t like that I was missing out on report data from all of last year. I got the issue fixed and it should be good progress going forward.

I know, super type A to not want to lose data but, I worked hard to get the budget where I wanted it. I am guessing the issue that caused me to fresh start to begin with resolved itself because the giant negative number I couldn’t figure out that caused me to fresh start wasn’t there when I tried looking at it today. Either way, there may still be some transactions that could be more finely tweaked into the categories I changed everything to but, I now know that I need to make changes slowly and check check check the budget before saving anything. No more bulk transaction changes from my phone!

As we enter the last week of January, I know we have two more expense coming out of our snowball category before I can officially send it to our current debt to payoff.

Our snowball for February will be smaller than normal due to Jonathan’s income in January being low. Since we took a week off to visit family, his first check in January was half it’s normal amount. We have never been able to take a week off to visit them before so it was a good trip.

We also talked this week about limiting our trips. Last year we went to Missouri 3 times, 2 weekend trips and the week at Christmas. We usually spend between $200 and $400 for gas, groceries, and other food while on the road. Limiting the amount of times we are taking this money away from our debt snowball will be good but we do still want to be able to see his family so we will not be cutting them out altogether, we will just be limiting to 2 trips a year, one in May and one around Christmas.

Yesterday was my last day to grocery shop for the month so I took the “leftover” from our grocery budget and added it to our snowball amount. Whatever is left after the two expenses I have this week, will go to debt and then we’ll be resetting for February.

I know I have one big expense coming in February, my car is due to have it’s inspection/registration done (which we have saved for) and is currently sporting a check engine light. This light has been on for a while but always managed to turn itself off right before it needed to be inspected. We’ll be taking this in early February to get it checked out. We do have money set aside in a repair fund which should be able to cover most of it, if not we still have to get the work done. If the snowball can cover it, that would be awesome, if not, the expense will go on the lowest interest card and be snowballed quickly. Gotta love car expenses! 😒

Not a lot as far as debt payoff goes this last week. I finished calculating how much we would need for next month’s budget category. I also changed to where I am automatically categorizing income into this category rather than as ”To Be Budgeted” and then moving to this category. That was I am just making one transfer to “To Be Budgeted” at the end/beginning of each month and not moving back and forth all month.

I also had to recalculate my debt payoff spreadsheet. It had a couple of formula errors that were causing issues. I believe I got all of this worked out. I am excited to see how we progress this year in our debt payoff. So far we are planning ahead to modify our fence so we can get a dog, something we believe our 5 year old is ready to take care of. We have to modify our fence because it’s all metal and there is a sizable gap between all the bars of the fence which could result in a dog escaping. We will be done funding this around March and then the hunt for a dog will start.

Our debt payoff for January is still looking really good. We have the giant sum that went to the mistake credit card payment, we should also have a little more that we will be able to send when we absorb the leftover grocery money and snowball amounts.

I am really hoping this year we see a sizable decrease in our debt numbers! I am definitely putting in the work right now. I even made Jonathan wait to make a purchase because he didn’t have enough money in his spending category.

At the end of the day we know that any amount we can send to debt over the minimum gets us out of debt that much sooner!

We had all of our credit cards set to auto pay the statement balance. I had changed one of our cards to only the minimum and we used it to purchase our Christmas presents, knowing we would be able to pay it off in 2-3 months. You can imagine our surprise when the statement balance of $1,200 was pulled from our account instead of the minimum payment of $30.

After this, we spent a long time on the phone with the credit card company who after sending us back and forth a couple of times told us that we could not be sent back the difference until after a 30 day processing period. So we pulled money from ALL sinking funds to cover the difference because neither me nor my husband want to spend another couple of hours being passed back and forth again when we did have the money in sinking funds to cover it.

Now this does mean that my sinking funds will be taking more to fill each month as I have to make up the deficit. This is where I am SUPER grateful to have found YNAB and the ease with which it was able to change my monthly funding goals to cover everything.

I also changed how we are funding future months. Funding each category a little at a time was driving me crazy so I just made a category under Bills for “Next Month’s Funding” and put in the title the MINIMUM number we need to fund our bills, sinking funds, and minimum debt payments. At the end of each month I will send this balance to “To Be Budgeted” and send all the money to where it needs to go.

We also took away our Emergency Fund. It keeps getting stolen from for things that are not emergencies so we will be using a credit card for our emergency fund. Paying interest on something will definitely make me decide whether it’s a true emergency or not.

In other news, thanks to the blunder with the credit card company’s system, we are ahead of schedule on debt payoff AND our payoff numbers for January look awesome so far!

Here’s to hitting the year strong!

Last year ended with not so much of a bang debt payment wise. We took any amount we might have sent to debt and got a month ahead on our bills. I feel this might help me to send more to debt. I actually renamed my spending category group in YNAB to “Pay Debt or Spend” and moved my snowball payment category into this group so I have more of a reminder when I am categorizing transactions.

Hopefully this strategy helps me. We should have a pretty substantial debt payment at the end of January barring any crazy expenses. We did have some belated Christmas shopping to finish making one of the Christmas gifts we hadn’t given yet. Also, we are putting a mostly no spend cap on any spending. We each have our own spending money from various things we are allowed to spend but no family debt payment money will be redirected to personal spending, only money we earn specifically for our own spending.

I hope everyone had an amazing Christmas and New Years and here’s to hitting 2020 strong!