Thursday 1 March 2012

February Wrap Up!

Time to lay out the results of the February Challenges. Here's our totals for the month:

We paid down $1922 on our debts ~ $792 to our Mortgage, $660 to our Car Loan & $500 to our Roof.

We transferred $595 to our savings accounts ~ $525 went to our joint savings, $70 was split between our two Tax Free Individal Savings Accounts.

We did a preliminary on our Income Taxes & discovered, to our great surprise, that we are both getting tax refunds totaling just over $2,000 together. We both had significant increases in our income this year ~ mine from 2 raises & Kent's from moving back into the Corporate world of audiovisual from self-employment. To get refunds, even without buying new RRSP's this year is a nice bonus for us. Next comes the "how should we spend money we weren't expecting" conversation. Our son is getting married this spring, so most likely we'll decide to use this towards the trip that we will be taking together as a family. We had already started to budget for this very special day but now we are ahead of the game & have added some much needed "K & J" time to our holiday.

We purged the house again & managed to donate far more than the 29 items suggested by Carla as the starting point for decluttering. I still have to bag up the clothing but even before counting in the clothes, we gave away more than 60 items, including glassware, dishes, books, toys & small household items we no longer need. I really liked this challenge & want to see if I can do it again this month, with a plan to get rid of 31 items. We also threw away about 4 bags of shredded paper & broken items that could not be donated. Our garbage bin was overflowing. But it felt so good to get rid of more stuff from our home.

One of my other tasks was to track every single purchase to see where we could cut back if needed. I discovered that we can afford to up our payments on our car loan, so we moved that payment from $125 a week to $200 a week. Because we are using our Line of Credit, we can pay as much & as often as we want. So for now, we've upped the amount we want to pay, knowing if we run into any difficulties, we can lower the amount. We will also be upping the amount we are paying towards our Home Depot Card that our New Roof sits on, with 0% interest as long as we pay this back before the middle of October, as we will, because we've used this process a number of times for the renovations for our home. And not once, have we ever paid interest. I'm sure Home Depot hates us by now!

The only thing I didn't get around to this month was to roll our coins that we've saved up. The money is sitting in a jar & I have the rolls but just need an hour or two to actually sit & roll. A dear friend of ours gifted me a new DVD that I really want to watch, so maybe on the weekend I'll have some extra time to take care of this task. It will be interesting to see how much we did accumulate.

That was our month. Hoping to do even better this coming month but happy with our progress so far!

2 comments:

  1. Congrats on a great month!! We too are trying to decide where best to put our tax refund, sorta fun to have extra $$ to put twards diffrent things

    ReplyDelete
  2. Just got a quote on having our dishwasher installed, so a bit will go there but the rest will go into our savings for our trip. Hoping to do a bit more than we usually would do without counting pennies as we travel! Have fun deciding what to do with yours Debby. :)

    ReplyDelete