New Budget

 Phone: $164.74  This includes the WiFi for this house. 

Health insurance: $102.98 But I hate my insurance. Changing January first, asap. 

Car insurance is now $79.75 a month now that I paid the car off. At one point, it was $349 a month , went down to $2-something and is now under $80. Love it. 

I don’t have a minimum payment required for my student loans, because of my income, but I also realized that I didn’t tell them I got married. They’ll figure it out when we file jointly. Each time I log in to the servicer “Aidvantage”, I make a payment that decreases the principal balance. When you’re on an income based repayment plan, your interest compounds and compounds and compounds. If I left it alone, then I’d never retire because it would be over $100K by the time I got to my 60’s. This is why you hear people talking about having made significant payments every month, but the balance keeps increasing. What a scam. The plan now is to pay it down much more than “just a little bit” each time I log in. 

For the three years that interest was frozen during the pandemic, the balance was $20K even. I started paying it down in September of 2023 when the interest started accruing again. My balance is now $18,200 even. Of course now I’m going to be tackling it more aggressively

When I graduated, it was somewhere between $37K-$39K  I don’t remember anything except that it was “close to 40”  

Kevin pays the rent here, but I can definitely pay it sometimes now too.  It’s low, because this is his parents’ property. 

Goals now:

this booklet I have in lavender. It’s stuck in the seat pocket of the passenger seat of my car. It’s full of slots you number from 1-100. In the 1 slot, you put $1, in the 53 slot, you put $53, in the 100 slot you put $100 and so on. I fill some slots and then take them out. I’m terrible at this challenge. I wanted to give it to Anna, but she’s going to be living in a dorm and I didn’t want it to get stolen. I’m going to be better at it now with no car note. And I’m not going to keep it in the seat pocket of the car when it starts to get high.  If you fill all the slots, you’ve just saved $5,050. And I am not able to do it daily, it’s going to be a per payday thing. 

I have a retirement account on the Robin Hood app. It’s super low. Part of me hasn’t expected to live long enough to retire, but now I think I will. I’ll keep adding small amounts to it. I was always raised to believe that social security would go away by the time I was old enough for it. But people my age and younger are fighting back on that now. We are realizing that that was probably just said to us in order for the people saying it to drain social security. And my husband is turning 62 in February of 2026. He can collect it at that point but doesn’t seem to want to yet. 

My side jobs on the apps- I’m going to lay off of those and work on my writing and sewing more. Of course, if I’m driving to my mother’s house 65 miles away, there’s likely to be a handful of them there and back. It would make sense to do them then. We have two HEB stores we go to- in cypress and in Brenham. One is 30 miles east, and one is 30 miles west. When Kevin and I shop together, I always push to go to Brenham because that HEB always has a bunch of jobs at that location. 

I’m going to be giving my daughter HEB gift cards since there’s one in San Marcos walking distance to the university and she’s only on a two meal a day plan. And because the university has convinced her not to work her first semester- I think her dad and stepmom told her that too. It’s not wise. But I can’t say anything- when I first married her dad, there actually was a few month period where I was a stay at home wife. Before my pregnancy with her. There was a few month period when I was about 20-21 ish that I lived with my parents and didn’t work. I was a stay at home daughter. So it’s not like I ALWAYS worked. I did have breaks. Would my maternity leave with her also count since she was the easiest baby ever?  Most people would say no, but that was a chill time for me. (I also had a supportive partner!)

Hopefully my financial situation turns around. I make good money at my job in my opinion. It’s actually insane behavior that I returned to a job I had in my early 20’s that everyone told me to leave and go back for my degree, and even more insane is that I married my supervisor/coworker. Goals are shifting now that I’m getting older. In 2014, I didn’t think I’d live through each day. Now I rock.