June Budget in Review
- Posted by JvW on July 9th, 2009 filed in Debt
Well, I have most of the financials moved to the new laptop now. Trying to import a PC Quicken file to a Mac Quicken file is a bear, but things are pretty much settled now. I did have a moment of panic where I somehow deleted a few paychecks from the register and the balance was by a couple thousand. Fortunately, it was an accounting error.
As far as the budget goes, we did pretty well in all our budgeted categories, and went way over in the “cash” and dining categories. Part of this is due to our business trips, where we make sure to carry cash, so once we get reimbursed it should be a little better. We have strayed from the cash allowance system in the past few months and need to get back to it instead of going to the ATM whenever we want. I plan to up our monthly “fun money” to $200 instead of $150 and move back to using cash to fix this.
In the beginning of June, we had our final payment associated with closing my husband’s business due, which came to about $3000. This put a damper on any other savings or debt payments for the month. I posted a debt update for June here.
In that update, I did some awful math and proclaimed that our July goal is to get the total debt under $130,000. Well, that would be paying off more than $9K in principal! I try to be a little more realistic with my goals. What we will actually strive for in July is to increase our debt paid off by 1.5%, which is about $3240 in principal. Much easier than the $9K, but it will still take a lot of effort on our part. If we can pay things off at this rate, we will be out of debt in 43 months, which is ahead of our goal to be debt free (except for the mortgage) by the time we are 30. Obviously, a lot of things can happen between now and then, but we’ll take it one day at a time.
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