~If you wait for perfect conditions, you’ll never get anything done~
Unfortunately this last month I was diagnosed with a health condition so there were several copays & one medical bill that was due that derailed the month a little. Good news is that I’m doing just fine & we were able to fit the unexpected expenses into the budget without going over 🙂 Since insurance can take some time to process there will be more bills to come. However, we are taking it month by month.
Side note: Our family has been using EveryDollar for 6 + months to budget & I am enjoying the ease of keeping up with inputting receipts, income, etc. In the past I would use a spreadsheet but it got to be too time consuming to do it daily. Now I use the app on my phone whenever I make a purchase. I’m sure there are other apps that work just as well, it’s just what I use (husband still has me enter his receipts) 😉🤔
January we took part in our first No Spend Challenge month. Thank goodness for that! I will put up a separate blog post about the challenge & share what we learned.
1) Pay off vehicle loan by August 2017. We just recently started attacking this debt.
- Balance of loan Oct 2016 $4860
- Feb 1,2017 $3150
- We were able to make an additional $250 payment due to the No Spend Challenge!
Steps 2-4 will be completed after the vehicle loan is paid off.
2) Change husband’s 401k contributions from 8% to 10%. Mine is currently at 10%.
3) Then slowly increase both of our 401k contributions to 15%.
4) Start paying down our mortgage faster so that we can be totally DEBT FREE! Currently we purchased a home Sept 2015 on a 15 year mortgage so we have approx. 13 1/2 years left!
~Rachel~
Mortgage Free at 40 
No Spend challenges can be difficult, but they give you such a great boost if you can complete them, and it looks like you did! That extra $250 feels awesome, doesn’t it? Good job!
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