happy finances!

**nice big stretch** aaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!



I just finished a little spring-cleaning in my online bill-pay realm, and am feeling pretty pleased!



When we refi'd a couple years ago, we set back some of the money for home improvements. Most has been spent, but a little over a thousand has been sitting in a non-interest-bearing account for over a year, waiting to be used, nagging at the back of my brain.


Well, DH now has a job where he's only home 4 days a month. How probable is it that i'm going to up and start a $1000 home improvement project on my own? Yeah. So after reading an article today at No Debt Plan, I decided to roll that money into our (until now) tiny, insignificant, growing-at-stalactite-speed, money market emergency fund. The one i'd so optimistically set up last year. Then I closed out the "home improvement" account, thus tidying up the realm a bit.

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!! Now there's enough to meet *almost* 2 mortgage payments. Or all the bills for one month. Not much, but a start! :D

But wait -- there's more! This month, the account i pay bills from seems to have more money than usual. I think there was an extra pay week in March -- we get paid on mondays. Oh! and i'm just remembering, we paid my car off in february, so there's an extra $50/month as well!

First, I paid the last $40 on my son's choir account -- that was a no-brainer, and now it's done for the year.

There are also 4 credit cards with balances. We owe 4 digits on one, but the other 3 are each well under $500. I've been paying $20-50/month on each one, depending on how tight things were. A bill arrived for one just the other day, which is what got me wondering in the first place whether i should put that home improvement money into the emergency fund or pay off the debt with it. Well, I paid off that $200, 20% interest card this morning!

And I'm trying to type that next month i'll pay off the HSBC card, but i really think it carries a $75 annual fee that gets charged in May. I'd like to just close that sucker out right now! I know it sounds insane to even consider keeping it, but it was for purposes of rebuilding credit and at the time was worth $75/year. Well it's my husband's... i'll check with him.

Now i'm wondering, since the point of having these sucky cards was to rebuild credit, if i shouldn't leave a little bit on them? like, $30? or use them for groceries and then pay off? anyone know????

I also learned that i can create nicknames for my payees, so i called these guys PAID and noted the interest rates that i had on hand. I'll update the rest as the bills come in next month.

Now I'll have the $50 from my car payment and the $50 from the credit card that i can put onto the HSBC card next month, which will pay it off! Then in June, i'll have the same $100 plus the $30 from HSBC that i can put onto the Chase card... that should finish it by July! Then i'll have $130 from the first 3 cards, plus another $30 from the chase card which will be $160 that i can throw at the big-balance card til it's done.

YAY!!!!!

oh hey -- in addition, i've been paying an extra $120 or so on the mortgage principal. I could even drop to normal mortgage payments for a bit, just to get the last card paid off.. at $400/month payments it'd be done before the end of the year! sooner really, because that doesn't take into account the smaller may-june-july payments. Also, there are extra pay weeks coming again in june, august, and november!! that's an extra $500 for bills in each of those months! Well, the one in november can cover the time DH is going to want to take off work for our Family Christmas Boycott at Great Wolf Lodge!! :)

Finances in our home are definitely looking up!!!! :D