Budget Update - July

Here we are.  Another month down in our journey to being debt free - or living with less debt I should say.

July was a good month for us overall, but had some sticky situations that we had to get ourselves out of.  Let's just start with the sticky, shall we?

We started the month with a commuter car that needed $800 in repairs.  We bought this car with money from our savings account knowing that it would save us anywhere from $200-$400 per month in gas!  It was so worth it!  Well after just a few weeks of actually driving it, we discovered the repairs that needed to be done.  We made the tough decision to try and sell the car and get close to what we paid for it.  After no luck for several weeks - I hate Craigslist for this reason - we finally found a used car lot sale not too far from us that allows you to set your price, stage your car and wait for someone to call asking to buy.  They have a huge success rate and within our car being there for 3 hours, it was sold!  We didn't get the amount we paid for it, but overall we were happy with what we got after trying for several weeks.

Another rough situation was that Ronin went to the vet for his next round of shots and we ended up finding out that he has a double ear infection!  Seriously??  Caleb hasn't even gotten an ear infection yet, and 3 weeks after having Ronin he has one in both ears!?  UGH!  As soon as I heard that I could only think of dollar signs.  We, of course, would spend whatever it takes to make sure our babies, fur or human, are taken care of, but it is pricey and not what we would choose to spend our money on.  So now this prim prince has to have ear drops in both ears once a day for 10 days - and hopefully stops dunking his head in the water bucket!

So after those two bumps, we definitely had some highs this month.

We had a garage sale!  The first one we have ever had together and over a year after we moved into our home.  To say we have plenty to sell is an understatement!  We had my mom and her husband come up and help us out - doing it for the first time without my mom just wasn't an option :)  We staged everything, got the signs hung and waited for the buyers to come.  They came, did they ever!  We had people showing up before our signs even said we were starting and it was awesome.  Such a high bringing in the cash and seeing our things that we no longer need go.  We had planned on only having our sale for about 4-5 hours and one day only.  We dropped prices and were practically giving things away for a steal in order to not have to move it all back in our house.  After 4.5 hours of selling we called it a day and it was a bummer for me.  We still had a bunch of stuff left over, but I had to keep reminding myself that we did great.  We managed to sell about half of our stuff and made $140!  That is $140 more then we had when we started that Saturday morning and it means that we can have another garage sale in the future - especially considering that all of the stuff is still on tables in my garage, AH!

We sold the commuter car, as mentioned above, and decided to put that money back into our accounts rather then spending it.  We put a little chunk into our savings and put the rest into additional debt payments.

In total for our 6th month of debt eliminating we paid off $2,829.43!  I can also say, with such excitement, that we only used our credit card once and that was to buy gas the last week of July!  This is such an accomplishment for us.  It has been our goal to not use our credit card unless absolutely necessary, and this month, we absolutely accomplished that!

We have set a $20/week allowance for each of us which is working so well.  We also went through our freezers and made a list of everything we have for dinners and came up with 31 meals - that is over a month worth of dinners at home that we have already paid for that won't cost us a dime!  We are trying really hard to make our money stretch and we are slowly, but surely, getting there.

And since it has now been 6 months, let's do a big recap.

February: $5,108.00
March: $2,829.00
April: $8,672.93
May: $13,879.59
June: $3,140.00
July: $2,829.43
Total: $36,459.26

I couldn't be more proud of us.  We are making big changes in our lives and it will only benefit us in the end.  We can't wait to see what these next 6 months bring and hopefully in the end we will be so close to our ultimate goal of just having the house and two car payments.