HisHersMoney

It’s official, one of our cars is now paid off! We had a balance of around $4300 left on the loan which we just paid off when Her received her year end bonus. It felt so good to call up the bank and tell them to just deduct the remaining loan amount from the checking account and then to able to log back in online and see the loan simply gone from account listing!

We have an extended warranty on the vehicle which covers it bumper to bumper for the next 27 months so we plan on keeping it for at least that long!

What are we doing with the $455 a month that used to be used to pay the loan? It’s going in savings. We set up a sub account at ING called our New Car Fund. Hopefully by the time we need a new car we can either pay cash or at least put a nice down payment on it to minimize the loan.

Unfortunately we still owe about $35k on our other car loan so that one won’t be paid off for while, but we knew that when we bought the car last fall!

Well, we have officially scrubbed our budget as much as we can for the upcoming 2009 year. Our goal is to bulk up our cash savings account as much as possible. In order to do this we have decided to go to a cash system for our weekly grocery, incidentals and entertainment portion of the budget. We will take $150 out each week and that will be it, if we spend it all in one days then it will be 6 very dry days until next payday rolls around!

When reviewing our spending from 2008 we really didn’t over spend on any one thing, but it was the $12 here, $20 there etc that really just added up. By going to cash we are really going to have to make an actual decision every time we spend. It was so much easier to pull our the debit card knowing that there was money in the account to cover it.

We both get an allowance of $300 a month to do with what we want so if we really want to do something and our budgeted money is gone we can easily dip into our personal funds if we choose to but what we aren’t going to do is get more money out of the joint account!

Currently it looks like we should be able to save $1900 a month. I have gone into our ING account and set up automatic recurring deposits for these funds which are spread out between various sub-accounts.  This will give us $22,800 for the year.

What is our plan for this money?

1. Money for Christmas next year

2. Emergency Account

3. Vacation Account

4. New Car Account

5. House Down Payment Account