Budget 3/03 - 3/16

This budget is sort of annoying. I am anxious to put my March Savings Madness into effect, but I have to be patient because I have a lot of bills to take care of first.

Well technically, my monthly payment to Sallie Mae won't be debited until the 17th - my next payday, but I can't risk moving the money to the wedding savings before that happens. Oh well, the money is "saved" in my head.

Here's my budget for the next two weeks, before the March Savings Madness truly begins:

Starting Balance = $1275

Credit Card - 120
Wedding Savings - 100
Groceries - 75
Sallie Mae - 407

Defaulted Student Loan - 260

Nice Collection Agency - 125

Healthcare - 70*
Misc. - 118

*This amount reflects the $25 deductible I apparently owe to my dental insurance, which is lame since I ask every time at the dentist if I owe anything and haven't been there this calendar year. Oh well.

Oh and if you click through, please note that I have started updating my sidebars after several requests. I added my next debt I'm focusing on (my smallest and highest interest student loan). I am going to add savings goals next, stay tuned!

March Savings Madness

Wow, it's March! Which means the wedding is only a little over 4 months away. Yowser! My fiance and I sat down and wrote out the remains of what we need to pay for and how we're doing in our current wedding savings and it's time to step it up.

Which brings me to the March Savings Madness.

In the month of March, I, Sallie's Niece, will save $2000 for the wedding.

You may be saying "but Sallie, you only get net $2400 a month and have $925 in monthly debt obligations, however will you accomplish this goal?"

Well, a few ways:

• I still haven't gotten my state tax refund, which brings me to a tax related conspiracy theory but I'll save that for another day. Assuming it comes this month that's $184 towards my goal.
• It's a three paycheck month! So I can divert almost $1000 of the "extra" paycheck towards the wedding savings.
• I got some extra work! Almost a year ago, I wrote about a court case I was assigned to, which sadly only netted me $50 at the time. Well it's finally ready to go to court so I get the remaining $500 of my statutory fee!
  

Plus my regular savings and a bit of belt tightening, I am confident I can reach this goal. Wish me luck everyone!

It's Extra Paycheck Time Already!

Woohoo!!! Right after writing up my budget yesterday I looked at a calendar and realized there were 5 Wednesdays in September this year and thus I had arrived magically in a 3 paycheck month without even realizing it. Previous 3 paycheck months I had waited anxiously for, so it is, I think, a positive sign that this one snuck up on me. I've extolled on the virtues of the Extra Paycheck before (and have heard the response of how it's not really extra money but we won't go there right now).

In April I started my new job and used the extra paycheck to update my wardrobe, bolster my savings and go to DisneyWorld. Six months before that, I used a extra paycheck to attend a destination wedding.

This time a lot of the money will be saved up for our wedding, which is a good thing because the money just doesn't want to save itself.

I am also going to save some money for Christmas! Christmas is coming whether I like it or not. I've blogged about how I really should set aside a little each month for Christmas. I even made this one of my 2009 Resolutions. So I am transferring $200 to my Other Checking Account where it will be hang out until I start looking for gifts. I think my fiance and I will buy gifts for most of our families together this year but I can't very well make him buy his own gift. He, on the other hand, has been saving for Christmas all year (atta boy!).

So here's my Extra Paycheck Plan:

9/02 paycheck

$100 - credit card (I keep putting a little on this card and paying it off)

$200 - Christmas savings

9/16 paycheck

$800 - wedding

9/30 paycheck

$800 - wedding

So that's my current plan. We have a couple of installments to pay to our wedding vendors in the months of December and January so I am glad the three paycheck month came now so I can plan ahead.

Where It Went 7/22 - 8/04

In the month of July I saved $1100 for the wedding! This is the second most amount of money I have ever saved in my life...and the fastest I've ever saved so much ever. Plus the $100 that my fiance had put in the account we now have $1200 for the wedding. I'm very excited to have saved so much....but unfortunately most months I will not be getting a check for nearly $500 in the mail.

11 months to go and according to my calculations we need to save about $900 each month if we are going to meet all of our goals. I plan to save at least $800 of my salary each month and my fiance will throw in extra money from time to time. It's only fair considering he's paying the mortgage, the electricity, and the car loan (more on that new development later).

Spendy summer continues but I'm not feeling so guilty about it. In the winter months when we're boiling chicken soup because it's too cold to go out we'll think fondly of the nights it was so beautiful we just had to take a stroll to the neighborhood tavern and sip cocktails on the sidewalk patio.

So, here's how I did compared the budget I laid out two weeks ago:

Budgeted/Actual

Wedding - 400/715
Aunt Sallie Mae - 407/407
Perkins Loan - 93/93
School Loan - 54/54
Sprint - 79/79
Laptop - 75/50
Groceries - 75/100
Misc. - 63/200

Jewelery - 0/20

I only paid $50 to the laptop and I'm not sure why exactly. I had enough money in my account (and still do) to pay the $75 as planned but I had a nagging feeling I was forgetting an upcoming expense. Oh wait, just writing that sentence made me remember....

I need to renew my driver's license. I have no idea how much that endeavor costs but I think it's around $50. The website is no help either...it says the fee is based on your license class. Attention NYS: there are only three or four different license classes, can't you just list the friggen fee for each one?

Stay tuned for my new budget.

Where it Went 4/15 - 4/28

Readers, I suck at saving. :-(

I try and try to put aside just a bit of my paycheck each month but it never works out. I know that having it done automatically from the payroll at work would help but I still want to build up a reserve fund that's connected to my checking account so I never have to battle the Evil Overdraft Monster again.

I blame the nice weather and my need for new clothes for work but I spent more money than I planned during the past two weeks. I also treated my fiance to a nice dinner out. One of these days I'll be out of my apartment lease and will be able to save more but now it's just discouraging.

So, without further whining, here's where my money went the last two weeks compared to the budget I planned:

Aunt Sallie Mae - 420/420

Defaulted Student Loan - 260/260

Nice Collection Agency - 125/125

Perkins Loan - 93/93

School Loan - 54/54

Sprint - 48/64

Capital One - 125/125

Utilities - 74/74

Clothes - 100/75

Emergency Fund - 100/0

Misc. - 163/260

Way too many bills to pay with one paycheck so I'm going to pay the other two smaller students loans again today to split that up for the future. At a reader's suggestion, I did figure out that the interest does accrue daily so the day you pay the amount due is the reason for the last discrepancy.

Much more to report concerning the wedding and other plans but that's all I can do for now!

Not Getting Married for Health Insurance

Today's New York Daily News had an interesting article about a reporter and his wife who canceled their original wedding and opted for a no frills wedding in Central Park. It's kind of a cute story and as someone who is planning a wedding herself I was interested to see one bride's journey to what is arguably one of the most important days of her life. Yet, as a woman who almost recently lost her job myself, I was more than a little put off by the author's decision to marry for, in her words, health care coverage.

On Monday night, our save-the-date notes finally arrived, ready to be proofed.

On Tuesday morning, when I went into work, I became one of the 294,000 New Yorkers who will lose their jobs before this recession is done.

In my case, due to budget cutbacks, the next day would be my last on the job. I had five days of health care left. After that, I would be responsible for paying my own COBRA (temporary coverage), a punishing $500 a month.

I called to tell Adam the news. "Do you want me to cancel the dog walker?" he asked. I burst into tears.

That night, we sat down to discuss our delicate new economic balance.
"Well," I ventured, "we could get married."

I suppose I should be more sympathetic. Losing your job sucks. Having to pay COBRA would also suck. Luckily if I had been laid off I was going to be covered under the State's health plan at only $48 a month for one year so I wasn't going to be subject to the same fate. Yet, of course when it seemed all was hopeless I thought "heck, why don't we just do this at City Hall?" That way we'd save a ton on forgoing the typical wedding and I wouldn't have any out of pocket health care expenses. Heck, even if we got married tomorrow and my fiance went on my health care coverage, his small employer would cut him a $4000 check for going off their plan.

But it just seems like this chick just wanted an easy out. She frets about canceling her dog-walker? She also mentions an impromptu honeymoon trip to Vancouver. Not once does she mention having a pre-existing condition and yes I realize health insurance is not something even the healthy should do without, but for $500 a month I would have just but the bullet for five months until her pre-planned September wedding.

Also nothing in the article talks about her realizing that spending a lot of money on a wedding wasn't something she and her husband placed a lot of value on given their current cirumstances. Tell me if you read it differently but to me it sounds like "I needed health insurance so we got married," Not very romantic.

If there's anything to learn from this experience it's this: don't plan a wedding until you have emergency savings to fall back on in case of, well, an emergency. I'll be trying my best to do just that in the coming months.

My New Salary is....

$47,500, an increase of $3900 per year over my current salary!!! Hey it's not much considering I have to work longer hours and some weekends now, but I'll take it gladly thankyouverymuch.

According to the handy paycheck calculator I used online, I will be netting $128 more a paycheck, for a total of $256 a month (more in the glorious three paycheck months like this coming April). That takes into account my pension (3% of my salary) and my continued participation in my 457 retirement plan (7% of my salary).

The fiance and I were talking last night trying to figure out the strategy for my newfound wealth. There's the wedding to think about. The student loans. Retirement. Emergency fund. Cash savings. New professional clothes. Yikes, so many things are happening at once!

We need to save about $5000 by this summer in order to pay some deposits. Photographer. Band. I think that's about it for now. My folks will pay the reception venue deposit. We opened an account in his name (that I'll have access to) in order to merge these savings.

Oh and did I mention I still have to move? Finding a new tenant for my apartment is currently the biggest wrench in our savings plan but hopefully that will happen soon. Worst case scenario I continue to pay rent for the remaining 4 months of my lease.

I'm also going to be getting a check in about a month or two cashing out my unused vacation time (now at about 54 hours = $800). I think I am going to lump that all into our Wedding Savings.

Stay tuned for more progress bars - though I am so enjoying seeing them mostly completed for the time being.

Budget 03/18 - 03/31

Greetings from Unemployment Watch 2009! I only have nine days of employment left but I'm not too panicked. Hopefully I will be hearing from the potential new job soon. They made it seem like I was almost guaranteed a spot in the new office but I don't want to get my hopes up just yet.

Since April is a three paycheck month (gotta love the Extra Paycheck!) I am able to have a slighty modified budget since I will be paid again just in time for April's rent.

The Good News: I am putting $400 in Savings!

The Less Good News: $200 of that money is allocated for my upcoming Disney trip. Although if I do lose my job I'll keep the money in my Emergency Fund and we'll probably do one less park day.

So here's my budget for the next two weeks. It took me quite a while to figure it out and lo and behold the last of my student loans have come out of deferrment (more on that later) so I forked over quite a bit of moola today.

Starting Balance = $1156 ($13 more than usual, thanks President Obama!)

Emergency Fund - 200

Disney Trip/Emergency Fund - 200

Credit Card - 133 (paid off!)

Utilities - 205 ($85 towards Overdue Balance - paid off!)

School Loan - 54 (still paying extra)

Perkins Loan - 93 (boo!)

Sprint - 64

Festival ticket fund - 50

Groceries - 50

Misc. - 100

It's been a week since my apartment was first shown to a potential new tenant but according to my landlord they still haven't decided on it. He plans to show it to other interested tenants soon. The only way I can survive unemployment is to get out of that lease so I'm hoping April will be my last month paying rent.

It feels good to finally be adding money to my Emergency Fund, I've been lacking in that department for a while and I've got a whopper of a potential emergency on the horizon. Wish me luck!