Tagged For Financial Goal of Paying Off the Truck Note
I got tagged this morning, by Lynnae of BeingFrugal.net asking if I am still on track for my financial goal of paying off the truck note by late March or early April. She wants to know how that’s going, since she has had mixed success with her goals for the first month of the year. Take your small victories where you can, Lynnae, and work on the rest this month! Better to be a little late on your goals than not at all 
Now, for my progress: I just authorized a $1500 payment towards the truck note this morning! I wanted to hit it harder than that, but after the dryer is done I will be getting dressed and leaving the house (before lunch if you can believe that!!) to put new tires on the Pizza Taxi. Somehow I am not comfortable with the wear bars starting to disappear and all the rain and cold we’ve had this week. I probably should have done this a couple weeks ago, but I wanted to make sure we had the money with the strange budgeting “problem” I discovered about mid-January.
I think I finally figured out where that mysterious money came from: Until last week I had been grocery shopping sans son and husband. Well, I took the teenager with me last week and sure enough things magically jumped off the shelves and into our cart when I wasn’t looking! Until that fateful shopping run I had been way under budget on the grocery bill … as if feeding the boy wasn’t expensive enough by itself! So the grocery savings account for at least $200 and we haven’t been eating out much last month so there’s at least another $80 … over half of the unaccounted-for surplus. Add in a little bit of savings at the gas pump because I’ve been putting fewer miles on the Pizza Taxi and hubby has been aggressively price shopping when he fills up the Stupid Tax on Wheels…and I think it adds up to close the surplus.
Sooo…where exactly do I stand on killing the truck note off by my target date? Well we haven’t done our taxes just yet, so it may die once we get that refund because hubby never adjusted his W-4 withholdings last year. If we overpaid by enough we can kill that stupid truck note off with one big Miss Piggy style “HEEE-WHACK!!!” and I will be a happy camper indeed. If we can’t it will definitely be mortally wounded.
Then it will be onward and upward to my next goal of saving up a fully funded emergency fund of 3 months’ expenses and enough money to replace our ancient central heat and air unit “just in case.” My target number for that goal is $11,000 plus whatever pitiful interest we are able to earn on that with all the Fed interest rate cuts going on.
A final note: I promised to do a round-up for our mortgage and homeowner’s group writing project, but there is just no way I can top RocketC’s wonderful wrap up so I won’t even try … I will just tell y’all to go read it over at Rocket Finance and don’t forget to read the picture caption for that post ;) He really did a GREAT job with that post!
