Our new reality.

I really cannot believe how much life has changed in the time that has passed since my last post. We were getting ready to list our old house when the world went crazy. For about 3 days we didn’t even know if we COULD list our old house because real estate agents were not listed as “essential”. I’m happy to report that we DID sell our house! WOO HOO!! We sold the house in 48 hours and closed on May 31st! I still can’t really believe it- we lived there for 10 years and thought that we would never be free of that house. In even better news, the new house is awesome! We did a bunch of work and cleaned and painted and painted and cleaned and it’s now better than we could have imagined. Big shout out to my best friend who helped so much during that time.

So, while in the process of selling the house, all 3 kids were home, 24/7 and both frugal husband and myself were also working full time, from home, 24/7. I will preface this by saying I am 100% aware of how absolutely freaking lucky and blessed we are that we’ve been able to work and earn paychecks and continue on. However, this has been really hard. My job is really demanding, and trying to juggle full time kids at home, house chores (split with frugal husband) and home schooling has been absolutely nutso. I don’t know how else really to describe it.

From a money standpoint we’re doing pretty darn good, the stimulus money combined with the money from the sale of our old house (which wasn’t nearly as high as it should have been given the neighborhood situation), allowed us to cut our credit card debt more than in half. I’ll be doing a frugal state of the union on August 1st and a comparison and I’m looking forward to it. My goal is to have all of our consumer debt gone by next summer at the very latest.

Also, we’re refinancing! We’re going from a 30 year to a 15, getting rid of PMI because the value has increased enough on our home ( yahoo foreclosure) and our interest rate is going from 3.875 to 2.75 (and 0 points as closing).

From a general well being stand point, the exercise of limiting trips to the grocery store, and then going to the grocery store and finding so many things out of stock and unavailable taught me a valuable lesson. We had lots of things on hand, I bulk buy a lot of things so we were never in danger of running out of food, toilet paper, hand sanitizer etc. but I realized that we could be doing better, there are lots of things that we buy all the time that are shelf stable and last a long time without any extra effort on my part, so why not stock up a bit on those as well? I would like to know and feel comfortable that if it gets really bad (and unfortunately I think that it might) we could ride it out here for a month in relative comfort. I’m not talking about hoarding for the sake of hoarding, but being well prepared to weather whatever storms may come.

So there you are, I’ve been feeling pulled to catch back up on my writing and to write a few posts about how I’ll be stocking up and organizing etc. and I’d love for you all to join me!