Money Matters
cbee817
member
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
June/July monthly check in
Just in case anyone checks here, I thought I would post this. Happy not to have a FB account, but miss everyone that used to participate on this board. 
June
What were your financial goals for the month and were you able to accomplish them?
July
What are your financial goals for the month and how will you accomplish them?
Status of Ongoing Goals
What are your short, middle and/or long term goals, and what are you doing to accomplish them?
GTKY Bonus:
Any vacations planned this summer?
Re: June/July monthly check in
June
What were your financial goals for the month and were you able to accomplish them?
DD#2 finished up day care- we spent over $82k for both girls so we're happy to have that payment complete! DH gets a lump paycheck to cover the summer from work so we were able to move $6k to savings. We also cut basic cable and switched internet- bill went from $97 to $42.
July
What are your financial goals for the month and how will you accomplish them?
We're still waiting on a start date for the exterior project. If we don't get something by next week, we're going to postpone it a year and ensure a start date the following July. We finally got our state tax return back- over $800.
We have been going through our belongings and pairing down quite a bit- feels wonderful to get rid of things. The bulk was donated, but some family members shopped at our "store". DH renovated the girls' closet- patched the walls, paint, new flooring, changed the light fixture, and de-cluttered. He's moving onto painting the office trim a clean white.
Status of Ongoing Goals
What are your short, middle and/or long term goals, and what are you doing to accomplish them?
short: exterior renovation, small projects inside (painting trim, redo the stairs, maybe tile the fireplace), save $1k/paycheck.
middle: cars paid off in 2 years, HELOC in 3 years (if we get the exterior renovation started), house in 4 years, vacations yearly with the girls, save $1k/paycheck.
long: 529 plans, max all retirement avenues, save $4k/month to an investment account, tiny(ish) house for retirement.
GTKY Bonus:
Any vacations planned this summer? DH and I are going to NYC for a few days and to Toronto to listen to The Minimalists speak in August. Also planning a few day trips with the girls.
I miss everyone also! I go check out the MM posts on FB, on occasion. But I can't access FB at work...which was when I was usually posting on MM...and I've just never been much of a FB person anyway.
June
What were your financial goals for the month and were you able to accomplish them?
My plan was to pay down my credit card debt by $5,000. Unfortunately, it was a good bit less than that and I only paid down about $3600.
I forgot, at least in my budget calculations, I had to pay the flood insurance for one of my properties last month. An annual (not monthly) fee. So that was $580 down the drain.
Then one of my tenants didn't pay any of their $800 rent in June. Their due date is actually June 10th, not the 1st. I could go on a long rant about what worthless people they are, even beyond the unpaid rent, but I will refrain. Per the court's eviction order, they were supposed to be out on July 11th. They refused to leave and we had to go BACK to the court's office and file for forcible removal by a constable. That finally happened this last Tuesday, so now they are at least gone.
Fortunately, they didn't cause much damage. We do need to do some paint touch-ups and fix a window pane. But they had the electricity turned off and the soonest we can get it turned back on is tomorrow. As such, the soonest we can even start showing the unit is Sunday. Which means we are going to be out July's rent also.
July
What are your financial goals for the month and how will you accomplish them?
Keep on, keeping on, lol!
My main goal is to find a tenant for the above mentioned unit, but that usually takes 2-4 weeks, so this goal will probably leak into August.
Pay my credit card bills down by $6,000. Ah ha! Taking the lowered income due to my vacancy into consideration
, but I'm also cheating a bit and taking $2,000 from my HELOC to achieve that goal. I have a BofA credit card that has had a no interest balance of $4600 until August 2017, so I'm stretching to pay that portion off.
Status of Ongoing Goals
What are your short, middle and/or long term goals, and what are you doing to accomplish them?
Short/middle: I am trying to get my 'cc utilization back under 25%. Once that happens, it will be a nice rise in my credit score. My next goal is to then do a cash-out refi for one of my investment properties that I (regrettably) purchased with cash. I'll then use that money to cut my HELOC loan in half and substantially improve my monthly cash flow. HELOC's are only amoritized for 10 years and the monthly payment is chokingly enormous. Around $2400/month for a $160K balance!!! Cannot WAIT to get that payment more reasonable.
Middle term: Buy another investment property and/or try my first fix 'n flip. I'd love to be able to do this by the end of the year, but I think it is much more likely to happen in the 1st Quarter of next year.
Long term: $5,000/month in cash flow from my rental investments, not including rent from my personal duplex. That is "retirement level" money for me, though I probably wouldn't actually retire until I paid more mortgage loan debt down. I'm about halfway there and should have this accomplished in the next 4 years.
GTKY Bonus:
Any vacations planned this summer?
Yes! My H and I are going to Chicago for a week at the end of August. I've been there once, but it was 20 years ago. My H has never been there. We were very MM, lol.
I bought our plane tickets during Southwest's last big sale. They are normally around $200 r/t (each), but I snagged them for almost HALF that! I was very excited. I snagged another great deal on Hotels.com. 3/4 star hotel right on the main drag and walking distance to a lot of what we want to see for $129/night. Most hotels in that area are double that.
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Sounds like a lot of great stuff going on in the @cbee817 household! Congrats on "no more daycare bills" and saving some monthly expense by cutting cable. Great job on "paring down belongings". Ugh, I definitely need to do more of that myself. Paying your house off in 4 years sounds awesome.
Have fun in NYC and Toronto! I've never been to Toronto, but I LOVE NYC. If JetBlue still has their sweet $200ish direct flights from NOLA next year, my H and I are planning to go again for a long weekend.
We have also had some planned expenses not happen yet as expected. These expenses will probably just shift around. One of those is buying hockey tickets from our usual guy. He hasn't been responsive so there is a chance we might not be buying them from him. That will just end up spreading that cost out over the next year as we buy individual tickets or he will make the transaction and then we'll have that planned dent to savings.
The other planned expense was landscaping. I couldn't find a good professional company to do our small job so we have been doing a DIY approach with some of the hard labor outsourced to the neighborhood handyman. We won't get it all done in one shot this way and getting everything complete could take another year. While that is MM I would rather just pay the money to a professional to get it all done already.
June was a pretty good spending month which will set us up for a more normal credit card bill in July. We did a lot of free
things and did a good job with food spending. My coworker gave me a free trial of Plated so that was a nice 3 free meals and I did my first mystery shop with Bare for a pizza delivery. It was quick, easy and delicious. I hope the reimbursement worked, I'll be checking my account later to see.
July
We'll keep doing what we're doing. DIY sod laying tomorrow and lots of mystery shops. @short+sassy you will be proud of our MS July, I think it will be a record for us. By the end of July we'll have 5 free dinners from MS (well one at a very fancy restaurant we went over by $20 so that was more like heavily discounted instead of free) with one of those including some nice free entertainment at a comedy club. And H is getting a free eye exam which is cool since we don't have vision insurance.
And July will benefit from using gift cards and more BnB income.
Our home/auto insurance keeps going up. I'm going to have to shop that. Hopefully I'll be able to improve it.
GTKY
No vacations planned this summer but there are some weekend trips to see family/friends. Our big vacation will be in October -- 10 days in Spain. There is so much to do at home during the summer I like to be around.
Update:
Whelp, there went over half my 'cc pay down for August. I have a convertible and the little plastic window thing has a 4" separation from the convertible top. I went to an auto trim place to set up an appointment for fixing it.
Apparently, those windows can't be fixed
. It just needs a new top. To the tune of $2600!!! On the one hand, I'm really bummed. But, on the other hand, I bought the car used and have owned it for four years. The only thing I've ever had to spend money on was the regular oil changes and new spark plugs. I already put an $800 deposit down and it is going to take about 2 weeks for the top to come in.
My Bare reimbursement came though just fine and I just got another pizza delivery shop with them for this week. Thanks for recommending them.