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Good news!
I finally, for once, have good news so please indulge me while I share.
As you know my mom owns a restaurant in Grand Isle, La where the oil spill happened. After many months of fighting, having to sell her car and hardly keeping the business afloat she's finally getting her personal BP claim settlement. It's not an enormous amount of money like some got at the very beginning, but it's pretty fair.
The restaurant's claim has not yet been paid so they are expecting more when that gets settled, but God only knows when that might be...that's another post in itself....
Anyway, My mom is giving my sister and I each $10,000, is paying our way to Miami for my sister's wedding in December and a Disney trip afterwards. She is also buying K's truck for the amount we owe + the cost of the tires he put on it 2 weeks ago.
With the 10K I plan to pay off the loan we took out to fix K's truck 3 years ago and our final 2 credit cards. This is equal to about 3K. I want to put 5K directly into savings and we will probably buy a new bed b/c we really really need one with the rest.
When she buys K's truck I'm going to get a van. I already found one that's an '06 with 40K miles for 13K. I really hope it's still there in the next week or two. It's exactly what I wanted for a good price.
Come May or June we will have about 8K in savings, be living off of 50% of our income including 2 debts (my van and the student loan) which we will work to pay off quickly.
I think that I will focus more on building the savings b/c I'm afraid K could get laid off at any moment or we could have a hurricane this summer that messes up everything.
WOW..I never in a million years would have thought we'd already be at this point when we were in such a mess just a few months ago.
Do any of my money savvy friends out there have any suggestions!? I don't want to screw this up!
Re: Good news!
My only advice is if you have any other debt with an interest rate higher than what you will make on savings, pay it off or a decent chunk of it. That way you don't have to worry about that anymore and then what you were paying on the debt can go straight to savings!
Glad your mom finally got a settlement! That's awesome!!
The only debt we will have is the van and the student loan. My student loan interest is 3.5% and I'm not sure what the van one will be. We plan to pay 1.5 - 2 times the van note each month I included that in the budget already.
My savings acct only gets a .5% interest. Can I get one higher than that somewhere?
I would try to pay the student loans off as soon as you can also. I know people say that student loans are considered good debt but to me any debt is bad debt.
You may can shop around banks I know our bank we draw a interest of 2.33% each month. I think last year we made 700.00 just off our interest on that.
Honestly it sounds like y'all are in a better place than a year ago. That is great.
You might look into a money market account. They usually have a higher interest rate than savings accounts, and the funds are still easily accessible. There is just usually a higher minimum starting amount for them.
Wow 2.3 that's great. I think i'll go shopping as soon as we get the 10K.
Ahh...good to know! thanks.
Thanks...the past year and a half was like hell, but we made it out alive!
*knock on wood*
That is great! My advice is to set up a budget. I get paid twice a month and I have a category for every thing and right now I have it budgeted it for the year. I know emergencies come up, but this helps tell me if I spend $100 this day what my balance will be down teh road. It helps me control spending.
I think having a budget does help with spending and lets you see where your money is going.