It’s hard to believe we’ve made it to the end of January 2019 already. I don’t know about you, but the month passed in a blur of recovering from the holiday season, keeping up with new goals, and cleaning out the clutter from our home.
Our January Debt Recap
Sometimes, it’s nice to see how someone else is making (or not making) progress in their goals, which is why I’m taking today to update you on mine. Really, though, I’d like to know how yours are going and be able to encourage you, so make sure to leave a comment below!
Successes
I could probably write a book on how blessed we feel coming out of January, but I’ll keep it to just a few of the biggest successes we had related to our finances.
Selling Items
Our month started out with eight nights of our entire family watching Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up. If you haven’t seen it, and happen to have Netflix, I highly recommend it for the entire family. We managed to clean out our entire house and took numerous carloads of unwanted items to the donation center. Additionally, we managed to make over $600 from the sale of various items that no longer “sparked joy” for us but made someone else very happy.
Canceling Subscriptions
I was that weird one at the gym during the first week of the month, canceling my gym membership. It turns out that, with a great coat and a new pair of walking boots, I was more excited to be outside getting my daily exercise in than I was to pay the $45 monthly fee for the gym near me. We didn’t see that savings for January, but over the course of the next 12 months, it will add up to $540.
In addition to that, we made the decision (not as easy for some as for others) to cancel our cable for a monthly savings of $80. We saw that savings immediately this month and threw the additional money toward our goal and are excited to know that, over the course of this year, we will save $960.
Pantry Challenge
At the beginning of January, knowing that we had a ton of food left over from the holiday season, we made the decision to cut our food budget in half for the month. So, we took it from $100 weekly to $50 weekly. By being extremely careful with our meal planning, though, we spent less than $115 for the entire month, leaving us with a savings of $285 compared to a normal month.
That doesn’t include the additional cuts we made to our household items, eating out budget, or our game night fund.
Ebates Challenge
You’ll remember from my January Savings Challenge that we made the decision not to purchase items online without using Ebates this month. Surprisingly, we made a total of $36 using Ebates this month. Honestly, all of those rebates came from Justin using his own spending money (and some leftover Christmas money) on board games and items for his 3-D printer. Even so, savings is savings, so we added it to the total!
By the way, did you know that just by signing up and spending $25 through the program, you get $10 back even if your purchase doesn’t qualify for additional rebates? So, if you are looking to increase your savings by $10 this month, why not give it a try? (Sign up HERE.)
Struggles
One of the biggest issues we had this past month was the fact that Justin has been really sick. He ended up with pneumonia at the end of November, and it took nearly six weeks for it to completely clear up. After that, he ended up sick with a really bad sinus infection that took him down for another week. The expense of three doctor’s office visits and several rounds of prescriptions hadn’t been planned for but, thankfully, we were able to cover those expenses (mostly) with our medical expenses fund.
A Change in Plan
When we started the year, our family made the decision that we wanted to see ourselves save $10,000 and pay off $23,000 over the course of the year. Initially, we had reasons for that split, but as January went on, and we really started to look at our financial situation related to debt, we made a little adjustment to that long-term goal. We decided that instead of splitting our goal between savings and debt, we are simply going to focus on debt payoff, in the amount of $33,000.
In fact, despite having $159,000 in debt (not including our mortgage), we recognize that if we stay the course, we can easily be completely debt free by Justin’s 40th birthday (July 2024). I’m not willing to wait that long, though, so we are going to be making huge changes in our budget over the next few months and see if we can’t cut that down by a year or more!
Becoming debt free won’t happen without progress being made each month, though, so if we break our yearly goal of $33,000 down a little further, we can see that in order to meet our goal, we will need to pay off a minimum of $2,750 each month.
Our January Results
I am happy to report that we exceeded our monthly goal, by paying off a whopping $3,670.61 in debt. In fact, we were able to say goodbye to one medical debt, and with our debt snowball amount of $1,817.62 will be able to pay off one of our car loans in February!
Additionally, above and beyond the amount that we paid toward debt, we now have $199.67 in our Acorns account (since December 2018). This is an account that I’m hoping to grow with the intention of either using for Christmas or some vacation travel in the future. Note: I have the account set up to round up on ALL of our accounts, but it only draws those round ups from my own personal spending account, so it doesn’t affect the rest of our family budget. Don’t have an Acorns account? I highly recommend this simple way to save (and invest) your money for future use. Get your account HERE.
Reevaluating Your Own Progress
I think it’s fair to say that, while this particular month was a huge success for us, that’s not always the case. In fact, even with careful planning, we’ve had some huge failures in our attempt to get our finances in order. If, for any reason, you didn’t see as much progress as you’d expected, just know that every step you take in the right direction is getting you closer to that end goal, so don’t give up just yet!
How did you manage your own goals this month? Are you starting to fall into a pattern of good habits? I’d love to be able to cheer you on, so leave a comment below!
Tip: Need help determining which areas of the budget you can make cuts in? If so, you’ll want my Quick Start Budgeting Workbook to get you started! Grab it HERE.
