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Archive for September, 2018

Monthly surplus higher than I thought

September 26th, 2018 at 02:49 am

I shared this in the forums but I had miscalculated something in my spending log. I posted earlier that our monthly surplus was about $3,000. It's actually more like $4,000. I had made the mistake of counting a number of monthly expenses twice because I listed them individually but also listed our average monthly credit card bills and many our our expenses get paid by credit card so I was counting them twice. For example, auto insurance, Netflix, alarm, cell phone, and more are all paid by credit card so I didn't need to also itemize them. Once I corrected for that, the surplus was much better.

So in August, I did the $1,000 each to Ally, Vanguard, and our mortgage, but at the start of September, I was able to send another $2,000 to Ally. I also did the same $3,000 later in the month just like last month. From the looks of it right now, we'll still be ahead so I'll likely send more to Ally again. Not a bad problem to have of course.

Daughter got a job!

September 12th, 2018 at 01:06 am

Our daughter got a job today! She graduated from college in May and we all agree that she could time some time off to decompress from the whole college experience. Honestly, having her back home really doesn't cost us much and is actually tremendously cheaper than having her in college so money wasn't an issue. And she hasn't just been sitting around playing video games all day as she is a supervisor for an online crisis support hotline, but that's a volunteer position. She has also been doing some video editing work for them, also volunteer.

She and we have some travel plans between now and November so I was concerned that nobody would want to hire her once she told them that.

Anyway, she started getting kind of bored now that it's been 4 months since graduation and she kind of feels bad that she's not doing more with herself. So we got the weekly email update from our temple and it said that the early childhood center was hiring. She previously worked there for a couple of summers so decided to apply. The director did a phone interview with her today and called back a couple hours later to offer her a job.

We're not sure when she starts but I'm guessing probably Monday. She'll be doing 24.5 hours/week at $14/hour. That's perfect as she wasn't looking for full time at this point. But I'm figuring that should net her about $275-ish/week after taxes. That will allow her to accelerate repayment of her student loan (she only has 7 months left anyway at the rate she's been going) and start contributing again to the Roth IRA she opened in high school. And still leave her plenty to beef up her savings, cover more of her own expenses (like contributing to auto insurance for one thing), and have money for some fun stuff, too.

Hopefully it all works out well for her.