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February 7th, 2010 at 12:48 am

It's been since I blog. Anyway, did our taxes yesterday. We owe CA state tax $833 but we are getting $5,137 from Federal. Net about $4304.

Anyway, we are using this money to pay our property tax $1156 due April. We'll use about $1500 for our summer vacation. The rest will go towards our emergency fund.

Payment Option 1 or 2

September 10th, 2009 at 04:35 pm

This month has been austracious in spending but I'm not complaining. We had birthday dinner for my wife last month. I also got a traffic ticket which i already paid. Paid off the annual payment for both the homeowner insurance & term insurance. Our 95 Altima needed a new radiator replacement include labor. Lastly, our old TV finally gives up on us. Replaced by a new plasma TV. We used our AMEX Costo card to purchase it for additional two year warranty and the rebate.

I'd pretty much paid off many items mentioned above except, the plasma TV. Sure we could have bought the lower cost model, but we really love this one.

Traffic ticket $507
include traffic school
Homeowner's Ins $406
Term Insurance $657
New Radiator included
labor $240
Plasma TV (tax incl) $2417
$4,227 Total Cost

Current balance now is $2814.00.

Option 1: Use the money in one of our account which has a balance around $1700. This balance is to pay our property tax due in December. We'll borrow from this fund to reduce the balance amount. By Oct 1st, this card is fully paid. This still gives us plenty of time to pay back before Dec.

Option 2: Make a $700 payment every two weeks until its fully paid. This will take us to mid November. The interest cost will probably around $20 to $30.

Which option you like?

We have a third option which is use our EF to pay it all off. But these aren't consider Emergency, so we shouldn't even consider it. Right?

Just one of those nights....

November 2nd, 2008 at 07:01 pm

So I had my kids buckled in the car seats already getting ready to go out for pizza. Pressed the garage door opener and turned on the engine--not knowing, the garage door did not open all the way up.So as I was backing out, all I heard was this expensive slamming sound noise. You know, what I'm talkin about? Got out and check the damages. It turned out to be a minor damage. But obviously its going to cost few hundreds. Some bending on the railing but real damage on the section panel. I also knew I wasn't able to take the car out. So I called for delivery instead.

I went online to find any garage repair shops that are still open. Luckily there was few shops that does emergency repair. One repair shop suggested that I should replace the entire doors since the labor cost will equal the cost of a new panel sections anyway. They said it cost just $750.00. But I didn't need to replace anything. So I called another shop who was willing to repair the garage door but charges $59.99 to come over plus $300.00 labor. The labor seems a lot but given the situation, I thought I might as well since I didn't have the tools to repair it myself. Altogether it cost me $350.00 plus $30.00 pizza.

I'd say it was an expensive dinner.

The good news, this is the first time we had to tap our EF. We had $12K EF balance, current balance is now $11,650.00.

Emergency Fund Goal MET for 2008!

August 13th, 2008 at 07:34 pm

We started thinking about saving for EF late last year. We didn't know at first if we could accomplish something that was never really think about UNTIL I became a member of this site. After many discussions with DW, we agreed (actually convince her) we should have EF in case of emergency. So we set our personal goal for 2008 to save $12K by 12/31/08. We were both skeptical at first since most of our disposable incomes are spent on eating out and entertaiment activities. We just needed to try something different to hold on out-going cash normally. But then after several of months of trial (we restricted ourselves from eating out, brought from home prepared lunches 3 to 5 days a week), we began seeing our EF starts to grow as you can see. By June it became a reality that can we actually achieve our goal even before our planned family vacation July (thanks to the stimulus checks BTW). It's all about the budget so long we were prepared to stick to this, we knew we can do it. So I'm very happy to say as of today, we have MET OUR GOAL and even BEAT EXPECTATION this year.

Emergency Fund Balance as of
01/29/08: $4661.00
03/01/08: $5935.00
03/27/08: $6950.00
05/01/08: $8225.00
05/30/08: $9250.00
06/13/08: $10207.62
07/08/08: $11233.95
08/13/08: $12322.65

We don't plan to stop now. We will continue to save at this rate ($1K per month on average) approach for the remainder of the year, except we will stop funding our EF so we can fund our other priorities (like x-mas gifts, daughter 3rd birthday party in December). Also my wife plan to visit her family in the Phillipines early next year. So we need start saving for that as well. If I calculated correctly, we should have enough cash saved without using our CCs to pay for up coming events.

We'll restart funding our EF again begininning January 2009.

July looks like a tough month

July 8th, 2008 at 09:55 pm

But we were still able to sock away $1025, bringing EF total to $11233.98 w/interest. Next month we should accomplish our $12K EF goal this year. No sir! We are gonna keep going till we reach our target goal EF $36K.







$1025 towards EF

June 13th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

We have reached a milestone in our EF balance savings. We have over $10K as of today Friday the 13th. I just hope nothing bads to happen on our savings goal. Gosh!

Wow! Another few months 12K EF achieved!

It feels good knowing we'd accumulated this much so far. With the cost of fuel and food prices rising coupled with inflation fears we feel good nonetheless about our personal economy.

Anyway, I'm getting my 5% raise next month which is excellent. That's an extra $2400 a year or $200 a month increase. After tax, I'll get $150 net.

Our originally plan was to make extra car payment of $200 to reduce interest cost. We currently paying $700 a month and still owe $17,992.00 @ 5.49%. I guess we got into this mindset of saving aggressively very quickly (after convincing my wife) we couldn't afford it NOT to. Beside we also felt, saving on the interest alone can't create "euhporic excitment" but savings thousands of dollars can. So why stop the "money train"Smile