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Archive for March, 2016

Monthly Update & Zero based budgeting

March 19th, 2016 at 07:26 pm

I want to start blogging our saving progress each month for 2016. March savings is where we are now.

April's budget is almost done once I get all the bills and my wife takes a look our budget. Some background about our budget, we started Dave Ramsey in January 2015 and immediately began following his teaching principle via podcast. Within months we started to do a zero-based budget. We had about 40K in taxable account in our brokerage account and began paying off our credit card bills, equity loan, car loan, and service time. In August I sold my WRX to some 19 year old who worked at Apple computer--drove all the way to my house from the bay area paid cash for it. So in 5 months of following Dave Ramsey we completely turned our financial glimmer of fogginess--sometimes darkness into a glimmer of hope and sunshine. It was a complete financial transformation. We no longer use credit cards, cut them all out and use cash envelopes. We paid off around 43K in total debt by June. By the time we began FPU class late August, we were debt free except our primary mortgage of $225K. We ended refinancing into 15 year mortgage few months later. I thought it was worth it since we have no other debt. We can save more while paying down our mortgage a lot faster. Our LT goal is to pay it off our in 5 to 7 years. While at the same time continue to save on other priorities.

SAVING SUMMARY YTD
2016 MARCH
ROTH $500.00 $3,000.00
Car Fund $300.00 $3,600.00
XMAS Fund $500.00 $1,500.00
College 529 $100.00 $300.00
Renovation $300.00 $1,300.00
Total $1,700.00 $9,700.00

Fully Funded Vacation
Lake Tahoe
San Diego

We filed our taxes and received close to 4K of refund. I adjusted our withholding last month. Our goal in May is fully fund my ROTH. Once this happen we can accelerate more savings towards renovation, and car fund. Xmas fund goal is 2500 for this year, I expect this to be done in April. Be nice to cross this list out.

Financial Progress so far 2016

March 18th, 2016 at 03:41 pm

I know its been few years since I blog here.


We have about $46K in cash, of that 30K is our 6-months EF. But we really need 24K at bare-bone budget. We have no other debt except our mortgage.

The remaining $15-16K are designated to the following (growing every month). I'm tweaking this number regularly so this numbers are changing.

1) home renovation $6K - Goal 20-25K by Fall 2017. But we need to start some renovation by this summer, at least start with our kitchen.


2) Tacoma fund $3600 balance - Plan to grow this balance to 20K by the end of this year. Not sure we are set in stone with Tacoma, or it could be 4runner.


3) Christmas fund $1500 (Goal $2500). Our goal is to have this funded early next month since my wife always tells set this aside first.

4) Daughter's private school tuition due in June for next fall $4200. We have enough to pay the current tuition already but we are continue to add more to this account until we decide to re-direct some of this funds somewhere else in the future.

5) ROTH Contributions $5500 will be fully funded in May.

6) Summer vacation fully funded in January.

7) I plan to sell VTHR 100 shares and buy more shares of Netflix. Yes, I'm going aggressive worth about 6% of our net worth in 1 stock.

My spouse will be receiving 2% pay increase this July. As for me, I'm not sure how much. Our bargaining team have yet to bargain with the state. I suspect about we should receive roughly 2% to 3% pay increase. Maybe we can add more towards 403(b) and 457 contributions.

Mortgage 15-year mortgage: Our target goal to pay off in 5-7 years. We are off target t(I mean way off this year). We just putting in extra $200 on average a month.

We are up 8% YTD in our retirement investments. Hope this continue. If I count losses from last year, we are still down about 4-5%. So we aren't fully recovered yet.