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Archive for March, 2013

End of March Surprise

March 29th, 2013 at 12:27 pm

As we get DH's pay stubs the Wednesday before payday, we thought we had the final tallies for March. It appears though that the quarterly match from his employer hits in March, not April. Not only that, they matched his new salary for the entire quarter instead of the old salary. Nice little surprise.

So retirement is revised to 60962 for this month which increases our YTD networth increase to 33.05%.

That's what I get for jumping the gun, lol.

End of March and beginning CC payoff

March 27th, 2013 at 01:57 pm

We have increased our networth YTD by 31.6% which means we just beat 2011's entire networth increase.

Assets Debts
Checking 3097 Mortgage 113362
Taxable 0 Student Loan 7189
Savings 300 Credit Cards 11279
Retirement 59470 Car Loan 10013
Home 200000
Car 11000
HSA 2786

(Ain't that savings amount the most pitiful amount you have ever seen? Mind you the checking holds a part of savings as a cashflow cushion but still...)

The next 3 months will be all about the credit card payoffs. I just scheduled the first payment for April 22 for $2100. May will see the payoff of the 1st card and probably a payment to the second card and June will finish the second and final card payoff. July we will allow the coffers to refill and then August and September will finish the student loan.

That just leaves October through December to stash money in our Roths which is doable. Any excess cash will go into our EF which needs to eventually get to 24k.

For the curious, even during the payoffs, we are keeping about a 2k "cushion" so our EF is technically larger than my savings but its definitely not large.

My latest research project

March 22nd, 2013 at 01:05 pm

So I know I want a smartphone eventually but am unwilling to sign a contract or spend a fortune per month. As a result, I have been studying up on my options. I have a couple of good leads but I have until late May (when my minutes are good through on my current phone) to decide which gives me time to hem and haw. I think I will end up with $14 per month per phone average which is actually cheaper than the $100 for 6 months per phone we pay now ($16 per month). Since both carriers use the same network, I know the new service will work at my house (an important consideration when your brick house neighborhood is too much for some carriers' networks).

It was bizarre how hard I had to work to find the resellers though. The main carriers were all ridiculous and even the big resellers were too high for what I wanted. Since I have been with my current prepaid carrier for 7 years I wasn't sure who was in the market anymore. A lot of times, it was the comments sections that had the info I needed on who the resellers were nowadays, not the actual article. Go figure.

I have to say though. After seeing the monthly expense of some of those plans, no wonder my coworkers are broke. My utilities combined don't equal the majority of those plans in monthly cost (2 people add up).

Now all I have to do is convince myself that I want to spend that much on a phone/mini-tablet/mp3 player/internet on the go connection. At least we are only converting one phone at a time. DH has already said he will let me figure it out and then make the move himself and his time is good through September.

Just when I was starting to understand our income

March 20th, 2013 at 01:39 pm

DH goes and gets himself a 9% raise, lol. The big issue with that is not the salary change but the calculation change for bonus and overtime. Base alone, that is another $5k per year. Though to be fair, they are changing the bonus structure here shortly in a way that will benefit us so I was never going to get an idea on those. However, this does mean that funding the EF might just be possible this year.

I currently think this will be around an extra $250 per paycheck (ignoring bonuses). It does not actually change anything before June though. The big difference is that the student loan payoff will move to August. At that point, I will probably have to ask myself if I would like to max my 401k for the year (because I don't have enough savings goals for this year) as it will be doable at that point.

End of February Update

March 1st, 2013 at 04:56 pm

Finally gave in and upped the value of the house. Its still $50k lower than Zillow's estimate but I think that is as accurate as I care to get. My previous value was starting to look ridiculous given the home sales in the area. Glad I don't have to buy a house in this area for those prices though.

Total networth is $127k now. Excluding the house value increase, we upped our networth by 11.49% year to date. Hardly surprising considering the massive increases to our retirement accounts. Should be quiet for awhile as we rebuild our savings for paying off the first credit card.

I do not expect as much progress in March. We have a vacation, a new (well, restarting an old) hobby and spring fever to contend with in that month so I suspect our biggest accomplishment will be minimizing the increase in spending.