Budget Update - May

Can you believe May is over already?!?  This year is seriously flying by!  My baby will be 1 before we know it and our year will be over and we will see how much progress we have made in this debt-free journey we are on.

If you have missed the past 3 months of our journey, you can read all about it here, here and here.

May was another good month for us.  We made some hard decisions and in the end it is paying off for us.

We decided to sell our boat.  We bought this boat as soon as we bought our house, well practically.  We were excited and in a good position, with the baby not costing us any money yet and me still working.  Ryan was happy, I was happy, and we had a boat that our family could go out on during the summer.  I never went out on this boat.  When I was pregnant Ryan didn't feel comfortable taking me out on it.  After Caleb was born he didn't feel comfortable taking Caleb out on it.  This to us was a bad situation.  Why are we going to have a family "toy" that only Ryan can use?  So Ryan put it up on Craigslist and after many, many, many people saying they liked it, we finally got a buyer!  We sold the boat, didn't make any profit, but got rid of our debt from that.  Selling the boat cleared up $11,339.59!!!  We do want to get another boat, but this time we want to make the right decision and hopefully not take out as big of a loan with manageable payments.

Along with selling the boat we made our normal payments and are working on getting our other balances lowered.  I called our cable company and got our bill lowered, or so I thought, and was told we would be saving $20/month!  I was stoked.  Then the bill came and it turns out they didn't tell us the whole truth.  We are now going to demand they lower our bill to what was promised or we will be cancelling our service with them.  We can go without cable.  As much as I would dislike it, we could do it.  We already have Netflix and Hulu is cheaper even if we have to find a new Internet provider.

You might think that by my statements above that I am a little coo-coo on how I think this whole thing works; "Sara, you sold your car that was almost paid off and bought another car adding a ginormous amount of debt to you.  You sold your boat and are now talking about just buying another boat.  You talk about getting rid of cable but instead purchases Hulu and separate Internet."  I know, I know.  But we are not trying to live on top ramen and be miserable.  We are trying to make it possible for us to live the life we want and not waste our money on things we don't, like credit card interest.  We are willing to justify paying interest on a boat, because it is something we love and enjoy, rather then paying interest on a credit card that we opened out of necessity and took advantage of and no longer need.

Overall, May wasn't a "pay off a ton of vendors" month, but it was a "pay off a huge amount of debt" month.  In total we paid off $13,879.59!!!!!!!!  In this one month we paid off almost as much as we were able to in the last 3 months combined!  I'm so proud of us!  We are sticking to our goal and making things happen.  We still have 6 debts that we would like to pay off, 4 of which are absolutely necessary, and I think that we can get really close to our goal.