Financial Check Up

I've been meaning to do a financial check up ever since I reported that we paid off our minivan, and I'm FINALLY getting to it! Without a big, looming debt to pay, it's been a little hard to refocus our priorities. I'll try to explain a little bit about where we're at.

Where we're at...

Let's see...

Literally, we're in a house that we're outgrowing. With baby #3 we'll lose our office, and we literally have nowhere else in our 1,200 sq feet to move it to. I had a market evaluation done on our house tonight, just to see where we were at. We were hoping (although not optimistic) that we could sell our house without a loss. I learned that we could, save for the agent's commission, so a loss it still is. Where that leaves us right now is sort of in a place of limbo where the only thing that we DO know is that we need to be socking away some crazy cash towards housing. We may hold on to this house, rent it and buy another one down the road. We may wait until the market turns upward for us a little and sell completely. We may decide to do some work to this one and stick around for the foreseeable future. Regardless, it requires capital. So, every spare dime we can muster up is going in to an ambiguous house savings fund. It's hard to not know how much we need, how fast or even really what we're saving for, but we've just GOT to do it.

Additionally, we're still doing a lot of the things we were already doing. Most importantly, a 10% tithe. Savings-wise, we're adding $50 a month to our 6 month emergency fund, $100 a month in a general  savings fund, $100/kid for college, paying a little extra towards our newly refinanced to 15 year mortgage, a temporarily reduced 6% to both of our retirement plans, and a $145 biweekly contribution towards my employee stock purchase plan. Additionally, we've added a $150 bi-weekly contribution towards a new car fund. Every extra penny from that point finds it's way to the new "house" fund. There's really not a whole lot left for that house account, which is leaving me with a new sense of urgency pinch more pennies and to create a multiple income stream. (I'm having REALLY good luck making some extra bucks with Opinion Outpost, btw.)

With our pre-budgeted spending cash, we're working on paying cash for a long weekend in Branson, Mo, buying a new bedroom set for the girls, a heated mattress pad for our new king bed and painting some rooms in our house and just generally trying to stay afloat.

So that's a little on us. I hope everything is going well for YOU! I know it's hard to make those dollars stretch, but we can do it!