June 3rd, 2008 - First exta payment $4
Sent off the first extra payment on the mortgage over the weekend. $4 from some rebates. Feels lovely to have sent something off!
Ummm, I should note that I wrote the previous post last week, saved it to check something, then forgot to post it. So it refers to the adoption. Obviously, that has changed, so we’re moving right into the new budget.
So far, I think we can put $50 towards the mortgage each month. After the new year, it might be even more. Right now, we’re dealing with over $1200 in vet bills from last month (besides Pi getting sick and dying, Emma was also quite ill. And we thought it was Jedi, so he was seen first, then Emma for something else. Then 2 days later we discovered Emma was the one throwing up during the night.). And we decided to up retirement to 17% and charity to 3% (each a 1% increase). The easiest way to do that is to take 17% of our gross income for the year, so I did. IE, we aren’t increasing it to 17% for the rest of the year, but rather for the whole year. Which means that during the rest of the year, we’re going to increase them each by 2% (actually, more than that, as I was paid extra for teaching and the MBA work through July. IE, a more than half of our income came during the first half of the year).
I didn’t actually do this intentionally. I created the new budget then when I could sleep that night, I started thinking about it and realized what I’d done. Blame Quicken–it shows the current month’s budget and the whole year’s. To figure out 6 month’s, you have to manually add up those amounts. I simply took the yearly total for my income and multiplied it by 3% and 17%, subtracted what we’d already budgeted, and divided the remainder by 6 to see what we needed to increase it all by. (Not including June because we’re using income from this month to pay off the adoption expenses already spent on the homestudy.)
Boy, does this sound complicated and I wonder if anyone is even interested. Oh well, this blog is also for my own records of things we’ve done to be frugal and live simply. :)
Oh, and I’m putting more of our retirement savings in my 403B, so we might realize more tax savings, and have even more to put towards the mortgage. Or the house fund–we want to fix up a few more things now that we have some freed up money. We’re loving the new floors. The guy to give a quote on the den is probably there right now, and we might see if he can replace our back doors while he’s at it. (If you didn’t notice on the pix, the den/office’s wallpaper is peeling. It’s ancient, so we’re 100% sure the paint behind it is lead based paint. We aren’t required to abate it at this point, but we’d rather since we can afford it. So we’re calling in the same guy who did all the other LBP work to do the room.) Every other area of the house has been painted or wallpapered in the last 20 years so it’s about time.