another giveaway!

I've taken an accidental hiatus from blogging these past few weeks.  Baby was sick, and after my household recovered from THAT, I had a friend visiting from Chicago... and now I'm in bed/on the couch trying to recover from strep.  I promise to have something interesting to say once I'm well. :)

But meanwhile... I've talked about The Thrifty Couple on here before, and they're having another giveaway!!  This time, it's $40 toward toothbrush sanitizing products.  I'll admit, I probably wouldn't have been interested in this giveaway yesterday.  But this morning, after diagnosing me with strep, my doctor said to replace all toothbrushes in my household, and that got me thinking: even when it's not strep, shouldn't we take better care of our toothbrushes?  Husband and I use high-end electric toothbrushes, and the heads last longer than your standard Oral-B from the drugstore, so that just means there is a higher buildup of germs on them.  My mom mentioned that she used to boil our toothbrushes weekly when we were kids, but I don't know many people who follow that kind of practice.

These products involved in this giveaway use germicidal UV light bulb power to remove up to 99.9% of toothbrush bacteria. Is that a replacement for regular sanitization/replacement of toothbrushes?  No.  But it seems like a great idea for daily care!  Enter the giveaway here!!

loaves & fishes

I love those stories about people who put their trust in God and are rewarded beyond their imagination.  Listening to Dave Ramsey's radio show at my desk at work for a couple of years, I'd hear those kinds of stories once in a while: people who had either decided to give to others even though they were in need themselves, or people who were really trying to live the debt-free life, or people on whom Murphy played dirty little tricks..... and these people often told how they received an anonymous gift, or a bonus, or found money in last year's coat pocket -- you know the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Our experiences were never that dramatic, but during our most intense debt snowball periods, I often found that, after the bills and debts and monthly expenses were paid, there was somehow way more money left over to throw at a debt than I had expected.  I would check my spreadsheet and double check it... and still didn't understand how we could have $xxx in surplus.  I finally stopped asking questions and learned to consider it a testimony to the fact that we were within His will, even when our friends thought we were a little bit over-the-top.

Fast-forward 6-8 months.  We've long since pushed pause on our snowball to save up for a move and a job change.  We've just moved back to Missouri and are going through the super-fun process of changing everything: phone numbers, forwarding address, auto bill pay, utilities... and the headache goes on and on.  Included in that are, of course, our financial institutions.  We moved from a national bank to a local credit union.  We migrated our savings to a high-interest checking account.  Money got shifted all over the place, and I knew that I hadn't finished balancing our savings account, but it really wasn't all that important since the number at the bottom of my balance spreadsheet was always smaller than the number actually in the account.

Now, lest you think I am super-lazy, please allow me to explain: we keep a lot of different funds in that high-interest checking account.  We actually consider it a savings account because it houses our emergency fund and our Lump Sum Payments, but it also contains our gas fund (making it easy to meet the minimum number of debit card transactions required to qualify for high interest), our tax savings (as 1099 contractors, we have to pay quarterly), and other smaller savings funds (e.g., medical and car maintenance).  It's not a complex spreadsheet, but it's not super-simple, either.

So fast-forward another 18 months.  After we paid off the car, I decided I really should figure out what was going on in that account.  I set aside some time to go through all the lines and properly allocate some money.

And I found $1700.  WHAT?!

Without a doubt, the Lord has taken care of us over the past months.  This was just one more reminder that He can take our tiny victories and multiply them beyond what we dare to dream.

I don't know what surprises He holds for us on our journey to financial freedom -- but I can't wait to find out!

snowballs

I have been waiting for this week for two months, approximately the amount of time in advance that I calculate out our budget.  (My husband gets paid 30-60 days after he invoices, depending on the client, so I have to be on my toes to ensure that the money will be in the proper account at the right time for paying bills.)

Because of my advance projections, I knew that we were about to hit a big milestone -- nay, TWO big milestones!  But I was holding my breath.  I also know that Murphy tends to visit when you're about to accomplish something great.

And visit he did.  All of a sudden, we needed new tires on the Santa Fe. *SIGH*  However, even after dropping nearly $700 on tires and related work..........

WE PAID OFF THAT CAR!!!!!!!!

 And then, just to add some icing to that delectable cake...........

WE FILLED OUT OUR SAVINGS TO A 3-MONTH EMERGENCY FUND!!!!!!

(If you're following the Dave Ramsey plan, you know that it goes like this: $1000 "baby" emergency fund, pay off debts smallest to largest, then 3- to 6-month emergency fund.  However, as described here, Dave recommends an alternate schedule for families like ours: an independent contractor is, in theory, at a much higher risk of being without income than a salaried employee.  So we needed a bigger initial cushion.)

Are we done now?  No, of course not!  But this was hugely satisfying.  After over a year of only making minimum payments and putting money into our savings just to take it back out again, we've made progress.  It feels great!

Today, we got out the Big Red Marker and updated our snowball chart:

Before

Involving baby early

After!!!

Baby wants to cross off MORE stuff!!

And now I'm going to use this space to explain a couple of items on our snowball chart that might look a bit odd to any TMM die-hards... if you're not a Dave fan, YOU SHOULD BE --oh, I mean... you can skip this part. :)

• The Santa Fe is on the chart twice.  Under the first occurrence are the words "to refinance."  Even though it wasn't "paying off a debt," one of our original snowballs was to get the car loan paid down to a number at which we could refinance to a much lower rate.  Doing so saved us close to $200/month.  Great decision, and the fact that we were able to cross it off the list gave us that element of satisfaction that comes with a debt snowball!
• We appear to have skipped a step!  At some point in the process of making minimum payments, the Diamond Membership (our vacation club) and the car shifted in terms of what was the Smallest Debt.  So we decided to pay off the car first since it technically was the smallest debt now... just didn't print out a new list.  The Diamond Membership is the next thing to go!