Thinking ahead

It's been a while since I've blogged about anything money-related and I realized, shame on me!

In the next few days, I will be sending $3,407 to my student loans!

That's a lot of money and considering I've already sent $1,960 during the month of June, I'd say that this month our snowball is bigger than ever!

Our snowball for June is $5,367! Okay, that's crazy even to me! (A typical month is around $3,000.) I'll update the debt payoff bar on the right once the payments have cleared (it's so hard to wait!)

Since we're just a few months away from being debt-free (cross your fingers for Oct/Nov), I've really started to think about what we will make our money do for us when we're not sending it all to ShittyBank and SallieMae.

The first is that we're going to create our FULL EMERGENCY FUND. This is typically 3-6 months worth of expenses, which I've calculated to be $11,235 (3 mos) or $22,470 (6 mos).

Therefore, our goal before any vacation or other purchase will be to get $11,235 in the bank as soon as possible.

Once that's done, we'll begin contributing 15% per month to retirement and the difference will be used to save for a vacation and a new car!

I've also realized that because our monthly payments have almost disappeared (fewer debts), right now we could live off one income entirely. That realization is very liberating and freeing.

I love thinking about paying ourselves first and we're almost able to do that. Almost.