Budget update!

I was only about 2 weeks late, but I finally updated our budget spreadsheet last night. We did go over budget in the categories I was expecting, but at least we still had “extra” money left over after all was said and done. And (have I mentioned this yet??) since we PAID OFF THE CAR (!!!), we now had to decide where to put that money each month.

First, our plan was to put the old car payment towards the mortgage and save the rest of our “extra” money. Well, then I was talking to my mom about it and she was like, well, if you’re not going to stay in the house that much longer, why pay up the mortgage? Hmm…good question. And we really don’t plan on staying there for a whole lot longer. Maybe another 2 years at the most. We did decide that we would like to move between child #1 and child #2. And if we have 2+ years between children and have child #1 in the next year or so…

So then I thought about maybe just saving it all. We do want to save up for a nice big down payment on the next house…since we won’t have a ton of equity in our current house by the time we move.
Then I started thinking about all the projects that we have around the house that haven’t been getting done because we’re trying to save so much money. Hmm…we could get so much done on our house projects with $625 a month!! I talked to John about it last night and we’re in agreement. The car payment amount will now go towards getting all our house projects finished and once that’s all done, it will then just start going to savings. Our friends have been doing some remodeling at their house and John wants to talk to their contractor about coming to our house to install our laminate wood flooring in the dining room (that we’ve had for over a year and it’s still not installed!!) and also painting our (two story) entry, entry ceiling, and upstairs hallway. So an extra $625 a month will definitely help in covering that cost. And we can finish A LOT of projects on that kind of money. Woo hoo!!