My and DH's paychecks that include our raises have posted to our work dashboards, so I now know exactly what our income looks like going forward. I went over our budget and have decided on how to allocate the funds. We will be using much of the excess in Oct. and Nov. for DD's birthday and vacation expenses. Starting in December, I have increased several categories including fuel/parking, family fun money, DD college, auto maintenance and DH car. I have also created two new categories. One is for housekeeping which will cost $120 to have someone come once per month and clean the house. I have her set to do a deep cleaning on Oct. 2 and if she does a good job, I plan to have her continue. At this point, this really seems like a necessity to keeping my sanity and make sure we have lots of time on the weekends to spend with DD. And I made a fund for family pictures since we plan on this being an ongoing, yearly expense.
While I was looking at all of the expenses and allocating extra money towards DH's car, I noticed that we had enough money in our emergency fund to payoff DH's loan completely. The thought of having that paid off was so nice. And then we could just take that money that we were paying and put it towards replenishing the emergency fund. I talked it over with DH and we decided to wait until we file taxes. If we have a decent tax return, then we would be able pay off the loan without completely depleting the emergency fund.
My real dilemma is when we have baby #2. If the timeline holds, then this will take place sometime in 2020. We are talking about me getting a larger SUV that will better hold 2 carseats plus our bird when we travel to visit family. That would mean a new car payment in 2020. Plus, we would have the expense of a second kid in daycare too. It is still some time away, but looking at our budget right now, there doesn't seem to be enough for both of those expenses without significantly cutting back somewhere else. But maybe DH will get promoted by then? Or get a new job? I guess this is just all to far into the future to get too worked up yet.