I know, its been a while. I apologise for getting too busy with life to not update this blog. Sometimes those ‘lazy days of summer’ aren’t that lazy. So here is the down and dirty for what we have done since the beginning of May.
1. My husband is back in school for a summer term taking Calc 2. This isn’t an easy course, especially since it has been a good 5-7 years since he took calc 1. I was trying to help him out, but I sort of think he is just trying to pass at this point.
2. The back to school means we sunk $600+ dollars into two months of torture. We put it on the credit card, but just for the rewards. I have already made a payment toward the card, and we will pay the rest when we get our statement.
3. A few weeks ago while going to yard sales as a family, we ran into a guy who had some high efficiency windows for sale in his garage. He had them left over from a remodel project and had been trying to get rid of them for a while, so they were only $400 for three of them. We measured our windows, and determined that even though we could get a tax break by buying new, these were of a higher quality and nicer windows than what we will end up getting for the rest of the house. Now we are just waiting for August when there is no more Calculus, and before the fall semester of school starts to replace our windows. I am looking forward to the end product, but not the process. It will be hot, and we will be replacing all the windows in our living room. We will be suffering without AC when that happens.
4. I gave away our old couch. It was one we got free off of Craigslist, and at the time it seemed like a blessing. Its not that the blessing thing changed, but that couch was massive. Like you sit it next to a day bed, and that couch wins for sheer bulk.
5. Thanks to giving away the old one, the last weekend of May we bought a new couch at the local furniture outlet. We have had some misgivings since the couch was obviously broken within a few weeks and the repair guy they sent did a quick fix that literally lasted for less time than it took him to make the repair. Luckily the store is good at keeping people happy, and after hearing it would be another 2 weeks before we could have someone come back and saying that wasn’t good enough they replaced the couch. That was a surprise. I was just hoping for a sooner repair date. But lets face it, when you spend hundreds of dollars buying a new piece of furniture and more than half of the time you have owned it, its has been waiting for repairs. You start hating that piece of furniture.
6. We did not double pay our mortgage for July. Its not that we can’t. Technically we can pay until the 5th with no additional fees, and we get paid again on the 4th. But, instead of doing the same as ‘floating a check’ we are just not paying extra. We get 2 paychecks in July instead of 2, so we will go back to the plan then. We might even pay more, but more likely we will finish off the HELOC and start putting and extra $200 (on top of double payments) toward the mortgage each month after that.
Yes, its absurd when you think about it. And, yes the interest rate is still lower then our fixed rate mortgage. But its rising slowly. And, it will be nice to have one less bill to pay every month, even if we won’t have any extra cash in our pockets.
So you see, we have spend a good $1500 in one time, randomish expenses this month. So, I feel justified to not double the mortgage until the August 1st payment. Also, none of these expenses, including school were bought on credit. That’s a pretty nice feeling.
The Finance Fiend 