October Debt Process, October Budget

October Snowball Progress

I plan to update each time we make a payment on a debt and to update the remaining.  This is the first of such updates. 

This month, as the previous list of debts indicated, we paid money toward the truck.  $1,420 to be exact.  As I said in my post about Riley, this is less than our goal of around $2,000 towards debts each month.

After the payment processes, we’ll have just about $940 left to pay on the truck, which we’ll finish up in November.  This is very exciting as not only will we own the truck, we’ll be able to adjust our insurance on it down from full coverage, which the bank requires for the loan, which will save us some money each month.  It may not be much, but every dollar counts when it’s going towards debts.

Also, we plan to make the trip to Salem to the Oregon Community Credit Union (the closest branch of the bank that our car loan is through) to pay the final $940 and be done with it.  I think it will be valuable and important to pay the final payments on each debt (whenever possible) in person for the sense of accomplishment and pride in our achievement.  I know it doesn’t seem important, but I feel like taking the final step in person will provide a much better sense of fulfillment.  We plan on doing that next week, so stay tuned for that report!

October Budget

I’ve been meaning to write a post about our Monthly Budget for some time now, but the end of the month is coming quickly so I won’t bother with a full post this month, but I will outline the budget we’ve lived under this month.

Typically our total spending money for the month is about $1,000 to $1,100.  This amount fluctuates up and down depending on the planned and unplanned activities over the course of a month.  Each month we sit down and see where we’ll be spending money and plan accordingly.  Unfortunately we didn’t adequately account for Halloween so we’ve over spent a bit on our clothing budget this month for our costumes.  I think also the trauma of re-homing Riley caused us to not want to cook and we ate out more, which literally ate up our Recreation budget.  However, being able to adjust the budget each month helps us to plan for events like holidays/birthdays so we’re not constantly overspending or eating out all the time since we have a budget to live within.

Budget

Pets                     $50.00          (food, toys, etc)

Clothing               $50.00          (sundries, clothes)

Recreation           $150.00        (eating out, movies, date nights)

Personal              $150.00        (household items, toiletries, etc)

Food                   $300.00        (breakfast/lunch/dinner items)

Transportation     $300.00        (gasoline mostly, parking, maintenance)

That is a typical budget we work from.  I’ll post a full overview of November’s budget next week so I can report at the end of the month on how we did.  Currently we’re not doing that great with October, having gone over budget in a few categories, but we’re still overall on track with our budget (we can shift some money from unspent categories to cover the over spending in others, but we try to avoid that since we’re overspending). I’ll post a recap of October next week as well.