September 2016 Net Worth

We are going to Disneyland Paris in a few days. This vacation is pretty much paid for except for food and whatever else we purchase while we are there. Hopefully we can save something in our housing fund this month😦. I keep looking at houses for sale in the location I “think” we are moving to next and they are all around $200,000 which is well above the $87,000 we have saved. I am hoping we can at least put 60% down on the next house we buy with hopes of paying it off in a few years. I really need to stop shopping…but…it’s so hard!!

August 2016 Net Worth

So, coming into August we still have $5,500 we need to save in order to hit our $92,000 housing fund goal. That’s a saving of $1,375 for the next 4 months which is going to be pretty steep!  I just paid $1,400 towards our annual car insurance bill out of the car fund at the beginning of this month leaving another $275 due plus we have our annual car tax which is about $350. Next month is our daughters birthday and we are taking her to Disneyland Paris which is already paid for except the train ticket from our local city into London and of course food and whatever else we buy at the theme park. Hopefully we can stay around $500 for the rest of that vacation. Good news is we almost have a net worth of $180,000!🙂

 

July 2016th Net Worth

Hello!! These last couple of months haven’t been good for our savings. We went on a week-long road trip around Scotland and a few weeks ago we went on a 11 day vacation around Spain and Italy. I am glad we saved but I know we could have done way better. Hopefully by September we will have $88k in our house fund🙂

May 2016 Net Worth

This is going to be short and sweet because we are heading to Scotland in the morning! I am glad the stock market is finally heading in the right direction!!!

Hello all! So, I have been wanting to do this experiment since moving overseas. I hang dry all our laundry except for the towels because they get all hard and not pleasant to use when getting out of a nice hot shower My friends all think I’m nuts because hanging clothes to dry in the states just isn’t the norm but I prefer trying to minimize our bills. I started staying home when we moved here and I think I have several jobs the main one is of course to care for our little ones, than keep the place clean, and minimize our expenses. I minimize them by cooking most of our meals and hanging the clothes to dry.

So, onto the experiment…. I basically logged the times, the meter readings, and kept what I was using in the house constant (tv on, desktop on, …) for the two hours it took to dry the one load of laundry. Yes! Two very long hours it’s ridiculous! Anyways, back to my findings. I found that when the dryer was on we used 4 kWh more than when the dryer wasn’t running for two hours. We pay 9.712 pence (currency is in pounds) a kWh which is 38.85 pence for each load of laundry if I do 5 loads of laundry a week and dry them all that would cost us 101.01 pounds a year and with today’s’ exchange rate of 1.42 that would equal $143.43 just to dry our clothes! When I first calculated the 38.83 pence a load I thought “Wow, maybe I should just use the dryer for now on”. Until, I calculated the yearly cost. I don’t think using the dryer is worth $143 a year I would prefer to do something else with that money. In conclusion, I’m going to stick with hang drying our clothes.

Net Worth April 2016

This month is looking a little better than the last few but we still have a ways to go before our investments are in the green. Our house fund goal is to have $92,000 before the end of this year. We need to save roughly $960 a month for the next 9 months which I believe is achievable but it will be a challenge with our vacations coming up. I find that being so into the month to month numbers makes things a bit stressful. Life and finances really is a balancing act and I’m always trying to find equilibrium.

Net Worth March 2016

The stock market is still a bit rough only gained $3,540.11 in our net worth although we saved $8k

We decided to purchase Florida prepaid for our 3 year old daughter in February. The 2 year community college plan was about $6k cheaper than purchasing the first 2 years at a University, so no brainier we went with that option. We are planning to buy the next 2 years one at a time. Each year runs about $7,217 for her. I am hoping we will be able to pay for her 1st year at a University by the time she is 7 yrs old. Our son has $3,511 saved and he is 1 yrs old so hoping by the time he is 3 we can also buy his first 2 years of colleges.

Below is a snap shot of our income and expenses for January and February. We spent almost $5k on vacations that we will be taking in June and September. In June we are going on a Mediterranean cruise leaving out of Barcelona, Spain and in September we are taking our daughter to Disney Paris for her 4th birthday🙂 Super excited about both trips!

Note: Income/expenses is from January/February

Here is a quick snapshot of our March 1st, 2016 Net Worth