financial goals Archives - Page 2 of 3

Why Do You Want More Money?

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone!

I’ve been thinking recently a lot about the “why” behind doing what I do. For any new readers, I am a wife and mom to two toddler girls, I work full-time, I freelance write and I blog. Not to mention cleaning the house, running errands and all that. To be honest, I don’t feel like it’s too much, but I do have very little downtime. When I’m home, I’m normally doing something productive (I count playing with my kids as productive, haha) except after 9:00 pm. Then, I watch a show with John and we go to sleep. I really love my life, but the busyness of it all recently got me asking “Why?

10K per Month in One Year Challenge

Hi everyone! How is everyone’s week going? It’s Friday, so that’s a good sign 😉

My week has been great! A week full of work with a little bit of fun mixed in (a trip to The Fresh Market for pumpkins, fresh coffee and dessert!) – nothing better. Tomorrow I’m working from home and plan on relaxing this weekend with my family. My girls have been so tired all week after daycare, so I haven’t seen too much of them and I want to make up for it this weekend with lots of quality time. Cami, my 3-year-old, has actually been asking to “go rest” when she gets home from daycare, and she usually ends up falling asleep for the night 🙁 This is at roughly 6pm, by the way. (Perhaps this is why she wakes for the day at 5am, haha.)

Today I wanted to elaborate a little bit more on my “Life Update” post from earlier this week regarding my goal of increasing my freelancing and blogging income to $10K a month within one year.

Here’s Why We Upsized Our House

We recently purchased a house – a big, beautiful home in an awesome neighborhood with an incredible lot. We by no means maxed out our budget, but this was at the very high end of what we wanted to spend. We’ve been here roughly two weeks now, and I can honestly say that this was a great decision for our family.

When we first moved to Charlotte, our goal was to downsize and simplify our lives. All the talk nowadays seems to be on downsizing and living simply. Trust me, I can get on board with that and understand why people want less bills, less stuff and less to take care of. In just our two weekends here, we’ve been swamped with errands and chores. But honestly? I like that! I still relax, but I kind of enjoy the fast-paced lifestyle of working FT, freelancing on the side, being a mom and wife, taking care of the house and more. I’m never bored, and that is a huge blessing!

Is buying an expensive house ever a good idea?

As I’m sure most of you read, I was offered a full-time job last week (!!). In addition to my exciting news, my husband was also offered an incredible opportunity to work for the company he worked with back when we lived in Arizona. He accepted the job yesterday and we both start in a few weeks.

While there are many, many benefits to working for yourself (like my husband and I both do/did), there are also many drawbacks. One huge one for us was not being able to purchase a home right now. We want to take advantage of low interest rates plus, if I’m being honest, we are both ready to buy. There are some huge benefits to renting – our AC broke a few weeks ago that we didn’t have to pay for, and I love love LOVE this house – but when push comes to shove, we’re not working towards anything on the house-front by renting. Now that we’ve been in Charlotte close to a year, we know that this is where we want to be for the long-haul. Our kids love it here, the weather is gorgeous and I feel very at peace and happy in this environment.

In just a few short months, John and I will begin house-hunting.

How to mentally prepare yourself to get out of debt

I’m going to take a guess here and say that 100 percent of people that are in debt wish they could be out of debt. Because, let’s face it, who actually wants to be in debt?

I’ll use myself as an example first. When my husband and I were dating, we each had credit cards totaling more than $7,000. John had student loans and I had a car loan. We didn’t like being in debt, but it wasn’t until we made a conscious decision to get out of it that things started to change. We paid off our credit cards within a few months and started living off of one income. Living off of one income for a year allowed me to stay home with our baby girl when she was born. I started freelancing, and any extra money we made went straight to our student loans and car loan. Within two years, we were debt-free, and it felt incredible.

June goals

I haven’t posted my goals in a while, but with June I have a few specific goals in mind that I wanted to share. In May, I didn’t accomplish too much since we vacationed to Arizona for 9 days. I had taken time off work the week prior and the entire time we were gone, so June is all about getting back into the swing of things! Surprisingly, my income for May was still high due to the fact that most of that work was completed in April. For June, I don’t expect my income to be high at all due to not working much in May and quitting one of my freelance writing jobs that I’ve had for nearly three years.

Financial tips for newlyweds

John and I are celebrating our four year wedding anniversary next week! In addition, my little sister is getting married a few days after our four year anniversary. In celebration of her new marriage and our upcoming anniversary, I thought I’d share my financial tips for newlyweds.

Our story

Finding balance between spending and saving

I’m a saver by nature and I’ve mentioned that before on the blog multiple times. I’m rarely tempted by material items and love when I can put my entire check straight into savings. But lately, I’ve been wondering where to draw the line. The rental house we live in is still pretty unfurnished, we need patio furniture and I’m due for an upgrade on my computer. But…none of these are necessities which is why I have a hard time justifying the expense.

“Next month if we make XX dollars, then we’ll buy a patio set.” “Once we have XX in savings, I’ll feel more comfortable splurging on furniture.” But the problem for me is when we DO make good money one month or we DO hit our savings goals, I still don’t feel justified spending a lot of money.

Buying versus renting: Our plans

John and I have been discussing a lot about our plans for the future, especially when it comes to when we will purchase our own house here in North Carolina. While interest rates are low, the housing market seems to have creeped up a bit over the past year. Since John just started working for himself in September 2014, the soonest we could purchase a home would be in September 2016. But, we think we are going to wait even longer to purchase a home unless the market suddenly takes a huge dip. Buying versus renting has been a frequent subject of conversation here in our household!

Here’s why we like renting:

How we slashed $900 per month in expenses

Groceries, food, restaurants, coffee and the like used to be where a good portion of John and I’s income went. In October, we added up our “miscellaneous” expenses – expecting them to be around $1500 or less – and we’re shocked (and disgusted) to discover we spent roughly $2,100. Thank goodness we made good money that month, but still, $2,100 is not a necessary amount of money to spend on food and household items!!

So for November (and all months moving forward), we decided to make some changes.Continue Reading