A few years ago we wrote a post outlining our 10 year plan. As part of our annual planning we decided to do a check in to see, how are we doing? Well… we are doing okay. We’ve invested 18% (goal 20%) of our income over the past year (yay!), we’ve put 35% towards the house (goal 50%), and the remainder went to cost of living, which was a bit over our goal of 30%, double to be in-fact, eeek!
Well some things happened last year. We moved to a new neighborhood that had better schools for Little Rock. We ended up moving to a town where two cars was critical, so we picked up another car. We also decided Little Rock needed some socialization so we signed her up for a preschool 2x per week. So all and all, things we needed to do for our little one. Family first.
So what did that mean for our goals?
Well, we will try to work on that a bit in the new year. We can still make our house payoff by 2030 (and save 100k in interest, I’m not joking).
We use YNAB to budget our money. We follow the way of the envelope system but in digital form (because cash in hand is just silly these days). We are going to use these tools to execute our plan. YNAB has really great “goals” feature where you can layout an over all goal and when you want to hit it by and it’ll say how much you need to do each month.
With that in mind, we are going to cut our expenses in half by eliminating the second car’s payment (first car is already paid off). We did a non-frugal thing and got a second car on a loan (when loans were 1.9%), we can afford to pay it off, but really didn’t need to, until now. We’ll pay it off with some stockpile money, and then snow ball that into the house to adjust the imbalance in the force, I mean budget.
With that we should be good. A bit of a bump in our investing, being super strict with our life expenses, and also paying close attention on the little things, that add up.
So what do you do when you fall down? You get back up, dust yourself off, and try again. We are all humans, lets not beat ourselves up over this.
It was a mixed year of ups and downs (there is a stock joke in there somewhere), but we will grow stronger from our learnings.
Until Next year (I joke, I really want to start blogging here more).
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