Updates

I never got around to setting November goals. I was putting a lot of time into the Obama campaign and then we had the car issues that took a while to resolve. There were also the blah's (lack of motivation) that I mentioned yesterday.

Somehow despite all of the craziness it was a really good month. Gameboy's industry seems to be doing well* so his commissions really helped. Our spending (ie credit card bill) has been pretty low over the last two months, leaving a lot of room for saving and debt payment.

Most exciting: Emergency fund=100% Eventually we will bring this up. It's 2-3 months of bills or up to a medium catastrophe. Once we get out debts paid down we will work on a 6-8 month fund.

Once the emergency fund was complete we shifted attention to the car. In the past months there was some disagreement over where extra funds should go. In October we made an agreement and I think the shared focus has really helped. We sent 2 principal only checks in this month. October's check was also finally cashed. It all came to $3,360.

My student loan** and the end of PMI (mortgage insurance) percentages continue increase at the speed of molasses in the winter. If anything it's a good indicator of why I never want to just make minimum payments.

Next month won't be nearly so exciting. We'll be paying off some medical stuff from last year that we were waiting to hit their internal collections (on purpose). That craziness is another story for another day. Suffice to say the majority of our extra money will be headed there.

The most important thing is it feels like we're finally getting somewhere.

*knock on wood and fingers crossed
**if you're paying close attention to the sidebars it looks like student loans jumped 4.5%. There was an error in my spreadsheet math that I discovered this weekend.