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Archive for July, 2017

Paid fall tuition with no loans!

July 30th, 2017 at 05:33 pm

Well, that's not 100% true. DD took a $3,750 loan but DW and I didn't need to borrow a penny to make the fall tuition payment ($15,135). Last year at this time, we borrowed $7,500 for the fall and another $7,500 for the spring. early on, I anticipated we'd have to do the same this year.

When I switched to working part time instead of per diem at the urgent care, that bumped up my income and we were able to start putting money into our savings account at a rate far greater than before. So I started realizing we probably wouldn't need to borrow another $15,000 but probably something less than that.

Fast forward to July and we had accumulated $8,000 in the savings account. We got an 2015 amended tax return refund of $1,400, a cash gift of $2,500 for our anniversary, and DD got a $3,000 scholarship check that we split with her, so another $1,500 for us. That gave us another $5,400. We were able to cover the remaining $1,700 just from current income bringing us up to that $15,135 figure.

Now the challenge is to see if we can save up another $15,000 in time for the spring tuition payment due at the end of December. That will be the FINAL tuition bill! If we can, that would be fantastic. If not, we are in the final stage of opening a HELOC so we will be able to dip into that if we need to.

I just closed DD's 529 plan and made final withdrawal!

July 18th, 2017 at 01:39 am

Wow. It's hard to believe but our daughter is entering her senior year of college in about 7 weeks. The next to last tuition bill is sitting on my desk and is due on August 10.

We still had a small balance in her 529 plan - $2,216.96 to be exact. I just put in the request to withdraw the remaining funds and close the account.

Total withdrawals from the account were $72,336.96.

It all seems kind of surreal but after we make the August payment, there will just be one final payment to make in December and then the college bills stop (though we'll still have a little bit of college debt to take care of).

Portfolio topped $900,000!

July 5th, 2017 at 01:43 am

In responding to a post on the forums, I updated my financial spreadsheet and discovered that as of yesterday, our portfolio stood at a little over $930,000. This is the first time it's ever been over 900K so I thought that was exciting.

I know that having $1 million really doesn't mean anything remarkable. It isn't enough to retire and it won't change anything about what we're doing but to see that we're closing in on that point is still pretty neat.

It will still take some time to get there but we're the closest we've ever been.