Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Our Journey Has Begun

Long story.

We don't know how we got here.

Over the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Corn Fed and I sat down to look at our bank accounts. We were quite surprised by what we saw. We had over $12,000 on our bank credit card!

Now to explain a bit about how we got here.

Right or wrong, I've only been paying bills using the iOS app for my bank. Bill comes in the mail, or email, I log in, type the amount owed, and pay the bill. For the credit card, I think that I had set up autopay for the minimum payment so that we were never late.

Credit Card Debt: $12,325.80

Mrs. Corn Fed decided that we'll set up a budget and keep track of our expenses. So, she used Numbers on the iPad and there was a built-in budget template! We spent a couple hours putting in our regular expenses and felt that we were in a good place to get started.

January went fairly well budget-wise. We ended up over by about $159 on our expense budget of $4460. This already did include money to our Emergency Fund and the Credit Card Debt (i.e. we are budgeting savings and debt as expenses.)

For February, we looked where we could make some changes.

Verizon changed their pricing, reducing their prices $10 per month. I also looked at how much data we were using and adjusted our plans accordingly.

Savings: $24 per month

We cut our cleaning lady. We had originally picked her up because Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back last year and we needed help around the house. We got better, but still kept the help for our sanity. We went one month with just one visit, but decided to cut the expense entirely in February.

Savings: $70 per month

I also changed some of our existing web hosting to less expensive options. GoDaddy had a $1/month sale on Managed Wordpress, so I migrated my blog/website to that hosting.

Savings: $19 per month

Mrs. Corn Fed canceled her subscription to People. I canceled my subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Savings: $170~ per year.

In addition, we changed the payment dates for our mortgage in order to better coincide with when we got paid. We were running out of money in our checking account and were getting overdraft fees several times a month.

Savings: $15 per month.

Total Savings: Roughly $140 per month.

So right there, without even changing any of our spending habits, we almost made up the spending difference from January. We're expecting March to be a much better month than January!

Where does our Credit Card Debt stand today?

Credit Card Debt: $12,305.17 (-$20.63)

It would have been nice to make a bigger dent in our credit card bill, but we were only able to pay a little bit more than the minimum in January. Therefore, the interest charges ate up most of our payments! Ugh!

I'll try to write a post about our net worth next. Because we're really not struggling over all. We made this mistake and now we need to fix it. We're not in danger of losing anything, but it'd be nice to not have this much debt hanging over our heads!

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