State of the Frugal Union

August 1 State of the Frugal Union

business background

Well murphy decided to visit again, to the tune of a propane bill that was about $500 more than we expected and a medical bill that was about $600 more than planned. I’m not adding either to our debt total (yet) because they won’t be billed until next month- I’m hoping that we’ll be able to get both down to zero before I need to add them to the totals below, which might be wishful thinking because we pay our car insurance yearly and that bill is due the first week in September and Frugal Kid #2 starts preschool and while we’ve saved some money to help with that, it won’t be enough to pay the full amount off.

Before we get to the break down I also want to note that as we’ve made the payments on the big bills that are due annually such as propane, car insurance, and life insurance, we’ve now started dividing them up by 12 and putting some aside every month so we’re not slammed with a giant bill in a single month. We weren’t able to do this before embarking on this journey because Frugal Husband had lost his job and taken a significant pay cut and we just could not afford to put it all aside. I know that it would have caught up to us eventually, but thankfully we were able to right ourself and start  digging.

So here’s the break down:

  1. Frugal house- $209,500
  2. Frugal Student Loans- $161,000
  3. Frugal Private Student Loan- $4,700
  4. Frugal Car 1- $17,681
  5. Frugal Car 2- $16,000
  6. Frugal Credit Card #1- $10,757
  7. Frugal Credit Card #2 16,000

So if you’re playing along at home thats about $3,000 less than it was last month! Woo hoo! Our goal for the 12 months starting in February was to pay down 40k this year, this puts us 3k shy of our halfway mark . I know $17,000 is a lot of money to pay down, but I’m antsy to do more. We should hit that halfway point this coming month, which keeps us on track, but I was hoping we’d do even more than 40k. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to make some real progress in late fall/early winter.

For those that are curious- do you want to see the numbers for when we started?

Thanks for stopping by! Stay tuned for the next installation in Sept to see if we’ve paid off the unexpected bills and if we officially made the half way point.

 

2 thoughts on “August 1 State of the Frugal Union

  1. I’d love to see where you started from. I’d love to hear more of your story, in general. What you guys do for a living, etc. And if you are willing, what is your current household income? Because while you have a big pile of debt, it sounds like you have a big shovel too, being able to pay down $3000 in a month. That’s awesome!

    1. I’m going to do a more detailed Sept. 1st state of the union that includes all of those things. Stay tuned 🙂 We do have a pretty big shovel- my husband and I work the equivalent of a full time person for our second jobs.

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