Hi Everyone!
Whew, life has been busy lately.
I am finally done my Christmas shopping except a few stocking stuffers, and I'm happy to say that I saved for it all in advance except around $300 which I funneled from our snowball last week.
What a great feeling to be financially prepared for Christmas for once in my life.
Also in the last month I sent Chase a letter requesting to pay our own taxes and insurance instead of having an escrow account. It was approved and they mailed our escrow balance! Yay! Not that it earns a huge amount of interest but at least the little bit it does earn is ours, not theirs. I added another Capital One 360 savings account named Escrow. Once you're a 360 customer, it takes about 5 seconds to add another account online. So now I just transfer to that instead of giving Chase all that extra $. Yay!
We took a little long weekend trip to WDW last week. We haven't been for Christmas since right after 9/11. Ds15 was only 1.5. I couldn't pass it up. Flights were only $60 pp down and $5 to return with SWA points. We snagged the YC through Orbitz so besides Disney's 30% off discount, we got another 15% off by using an Orbitz promo code.
So we flew down on Friday the 4th after work, crashed at the Hyatt because of our 11:30pm arrival, then headed onto ME in the morning. Only 3 park days but with hoppers we sure squeezed a lot in. By the 3rd day we were ready to drop. We sure don't have the stamina for park touring like we did when our kids were little! Flew home Tues the 8th in the afternoon. Our 16 yr old niece joined us again and she had only been to WDW once at age 6. We really tried to show her as much as possible in the short time we had. Overall it was a great trip. I really wish we could have had at least 1 pool day. They offer such great activities it's a shame to miss so much of that too and feels good to just relax in the sun. Maybe next time.
Of course Murphy felt he's been away too long and stopped by to visit. Our washer is on life support. It's probably 5-8 yrs old so I guess that's pretty good for modern appliances. I considered getting it fixed because so many people I know complain about their HE-type washers and how they don't use enough water to really clean clothes & how it takes an hour per load. Reviews I was reading on Best Buy & Sears all sounded the same. Meh.
I stumbled onto Speed Queen which gets 5 star reviews on
Amazon and everywhere that sells them. So for once I'm excited to do laundry this weekend. We'll see if it's really as wonderful as everyone says. Can't wait for delivery.
What sucks is that this month we get 3 paychecks and since I keep a list of bills for each check, this one has relatively very little I have to set aside for other stuff. I had planned to make a big truck payment but now a good chunk of that will have to pay for the washer. At least I don't have to dip into the emergency fund. Even if I did, I'd still have to replenish it which will take away from future snowballing so either way it has to come from the snowball.
Oh well, stuff happens. At least we're all healthy and doing ok.
I'll have to recalculate our payoff dates but before the washer died we would have had the truck paid off by St. Patty's Day and our 0% vacation card paid off in May. That leaves us with just a mortgage! yay!
(Well, and ds18's Parent Plus loans for college which we're paying for now but hopefully not forever.) So I guess, still not technically debt-free but as close as we've ever been.
One last thing. Our HS kids are required by the state to take a semester class called Financial Literacy. Ds18 took it in 10th grade. From what he explained it seemed mostly about investing & compounding interest (earning it and paying it through debt). Later, he said he regretted taking it so young and wished he took it his senior year; he would have appreciated it more. So for graduation I got him this.
http://www.amazon.com/Didnt-They-Teach-This-School/dp/1481027565/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450236953&sr=1-1&keywords=why+didn't+they+teach+me+this+in+school
He still hasn't read it.
Just keep swimming!