To the future!

Apologies for my lengthy absence.  Debt repayment has been taking small steps forward and large steps backward in the last year and it has frustrated me to the point that I haven't wanted to blog about it.  I should blog about it though, because this is how debt repayment goes.  You think you're making great progress climbing out of the hole and some unforeseen circumstance knocks you back down into the chasm. It has happened before and it will very likely happen again.  I need to prepare as best I can and handle these things as they come.

Kindergarten expenses took a huge toll.  The initial plan was to split the girls' $8,000 worth of kindergarten tuition expenses 50/50 with their dad (he would pay for one child and I would pay for the other), but I found out with just a few weeks left of the school year that he hadn't made any payments.  I scraped together enough debt to cover her $4,000 tuition and promptly filed the child support modification request that I had intended to hold onto until after the wedding.  We'll see how that turns out.  I read through it a dozen times making sure I was being objective and fair in asking for a modification.  Ugh... I hate drama.

So, on to happier things!

We've got less than six weeks to the wedding!  We've managed to cash-flow everything.  We've shopped around and found deals on things we love.  We've asked to borrow things rather than buy them.  We've DIYed a LOT.  We've recruited a team of friends and family to help us make our wedding happen.  Will our wedding be featured on a wedding blog for other couples to fawn over?  Probably not.  But we're going to get married and celebrate and we're going to start our marriage without any wedding-related financial stress. I'll give up all the short-term fuss in exchange for meeting some long-term goals, thankyouverymuch.  We're not fancy people and I'd rather not fake it on such an important day.


All three of the kids have finished kindergarten and are excited about the wedding.  They've had a great summer so far.  It is now clear that putting the girls in separate classrooms has been good for them because they're getting really tired of each other already and can't wait for school to start again so they can get some time apart.

It's sometimes strange living in our little sociology project.  Reagan was diagnosed with ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder partway through kindergarten.  We suspected the ADHD long before, but put off having her screened by a professional.  We've learned a lot about how her brain functions differently than our other two kids (and our own) and she's doing just fine most of the time.  All three kids have their own bedrooms now and I think having her own space where is free to be alone if she so chooses has helped her immensely.  She is also responsible for that space and takes a lot of pride in organizing her new desk to make room for drawing.

Cow in a Thunderstorm - by Reagan

We have issued a reading challenge for the kids this summer.  We've asked them to read at least two hours per week.  Every week that they meet their goal, they each get to choose a new book to buy for their personal library.  At the end of the summer, provided they have met their challenge consistently, we are going to go to a theme park as a family.  They've really taken to it.  Those weekly trips to the bookstore are a lot of fun.  Kieran picked out Mercy Watson to the Rescue when we went book shopping on Sunday and she has already read it twice!

So overdue!!!

Ugh... These big balances are slow-moving, but I'm chipping away. Baby steps...

The girls and I moved in with my fiance and his son a few weeks ago. The kids are all settled in. The girls are looking forward to painting their room. My old apartment is the only place they remember living, so choosing wall colors and having a small yard is a lot of fun for them.

I started talking about my methods of handling finances before we were even engaged, so this hasn't been a shock to him. We have decided to keep our finances separate until after the wedding, though we may open a separate joint account solely for wedding saving and spending. Our current challenge is that my fiance is unemployed every July (he works for a local school district), so in our first month living together, I am the sole wage-earner. It's a challenge, but we held a garage sale one weekend and raised a good chunk of change in the miserable Minnesota humidity. I also had a nicely-timed bonus that helped us out and I have been working as many extra hours as I can without sacrificing family time (or my sanity). We're going to get through the month just fine and I think our emergency fund will survive unscathed.

The next challenge is going to be the school year. We've decided to put the kids in full-day kindergarten rather than continue daycare. Kindergarten tuition is not tax-deductible, nor can it be paid for using my FSA (don't get me started on how backwards this seems to me). I had a short mental debate about whether or not we should opt for half-day kindergarten and part-time daycare given these facts, but decided that I'll pay taxes for the kids to be in an educational environment all day. The cost for our local public school for full-day kindergarten is about $4,000 per child per year. We have to work that into our budget as well as saving for our wedding and continuing to pay down debt. This will be a challenging year, but we're a team and we're going to make it!

One year later...

This post is a little belated due to various factors related to family and work and general business. Regular scheduled posting is still a dream that I hope to one day achieve.

Without further ado, after a year of working toward a goal of paying off $15,000 of debt (save for about 6 weeks where I fell off the wagon), my debt load has been reduced by a total of...

$17,035.14

I still have a $1,000 emergency fund in the bank. My net worth has improved by $17,806. My stress level has decreased by a billion percent. My happiness has increased, to quote one of my children, "one hundred million a jillion times."

Here is a balance update:

Direct Deposit Advance - $0/$550
Store Card 1 - $0/$323
Credit Card 1 - $0/$400
Line of Credit - $0/$510
Credit Card 2 - $0/$685
Store Card 2 - $0/$2,798
Auto Loan - $0/$4,140
Credit Card 4 - $1,933/$5,150
Credit Card 3 - $3,564/$4,577
Student Loan 1 - $1,705/$1951
Student Loan 2 - $2,046/$3,148
Student Loan 3 - $4,926/$5,614
Student Loan 4 - $5,538/$6,048


I'm almost half-way done!! According to my debt tracker, I'm currently scheduled to pay off my debt in July 2012 which, coincidently, is the same month in which my fiance and I intend to wed. As I've gone through this process, that date has moved up more and more, so I'm actually hoping to be able to pay everything off prior to the wedding and still pull off a great celebration without any debt. How awesome would it be to enter our marriage without these financial burdens?