Hellobee Boards

I’m also using YNAB but would love to switch to something without a subscription. I used to do it by hand but that is a lot of work and I’m not sure what is the best way anymore. I have 8 payments left on my student loan (hallelujah) and after that we do have some debt to pay off but I’d also like to save and take a vacation! Plus money in the bank makes me feel secure so I’d like to up our savings

My goal for January is to make a baseline personal budgeted income statement and balance sheet. Nerd alert. I want to have a better idea of what our living expenses are for a year.

@gotkimchi: having bigger goals helps me save money. Then I think twice about spending frivolously because I'd rather save for the dishwasher I want.

Also trying to make things instead of buying them. Being a Sahm helps with that one too.

We have been using YNAB for years and love it. I should say DH uses it, because I’m not numbers minded at all. His favorite thing lately is the “age of money” feature.

@graceandjoy: We have a “stuff I will forget” category for things that come up like book fair etc and DH tries to set money aside ahead of time for the yearly or twice yearly car and life insurance, but sometimes we forget!

@SweetCaroline: ok I’ve totally done this and everything we have is low interest so it’s not that motivating lol! But I want to free up some monthly money so as soon as my student loan is paid off I’m going to see if we have any low hanging fruit we can attack

@gotkimchi: i hear ya! They were most motivating when we were paying off our mortgage, because regardless of the favorable interest rate, it was exciting for us to see how it closed the gap and tooks years off.

It is awesome to free up monthly payments and decise what to do with the free cash next!

I recently realized that I’ve had the same budget spreadsheet for 10 years! So yes I like to budget I signed up for YNAB with the free trial recently but I couldn’t get into it. I think I essentially use the same concept with our budget which is that pretty much every dollar goes some place each month, with the extra to going to different savings. We aren’t that great at sticking to the budget for discretionary spending, we put everything on credit cards that we pay off at the end of each month and so I just have an overall budget for Credit. Cards. It seems like we always go a bit over my budgeted amount but it works out in the end since there’s a bit of a buffer. I’ve also tried to do sinking funds (though I just learned that term from this thread!) but it doesn’t work for me for some reason.

My current goals are to try to figure out if we’re really doing what we need to for retirement. I have a very good pension but I worry if something were to happen to me and I would also like my DH to be able to retire (early) when I do, but he started saving for retirement relatively late. We max out our Roth IRAs, he puts into his 401k to get his match but the fees are too high to make sense putting in more than that (I think). So trying to determine where to put any additional amount we’ll be able to save once we have only one in daycare (and even if we really need to up it? I’m sure we do) next year.

@petitenoisette: ok this is where I’m struggling with ynab. We also only use a credit card and my husband is terrible about discretionary spending and also if I budget x for groceries but am at the limit it’s not like I don’t buy groceries. I like the idea of just having credit card category

I’ve always been a huge budget-er. Now a single mom I need to buckle down and figure this out again! I use a manual spreadsheet to track but am considering using an app now that I’m the only one I have to keep track of!!

Sorry to thread highjack but @Portboston: how are things going? Sounds like you are officially separated?

How does everyone feel about paying off debt? Pay it off early? Just make the payments if it’s low interest? This is something I’ve been really thinking about since I’d like to save more and take a vacation!

@gotkimchi: it depends on what your financial goals are.

For the first 5 years of our marriage, we focused on debt repayment, because we had 80-85K of student loan debt, average APR 6-7%. That's not low interest to me, especially at that amount of principal. So we lived really frugally and spent 25% of our take-home $$ on debt repayment. We got the balance down under 30-40K quickly, but then had kids.

Now that we have kids (plus unpaid maternity leaves, big medical bills, etc), AND that our student debt is at a more manageable level (17K at 6%), our financial goals have shifted. We recently saved up and paid cash for 19K worth of backyard improvements, and that's 4-5 months of take-home income for us - so, it was a big deal.

We still have 17K of loans but paying off now vs. paying the standard repayment only saves us 3K in interest so that's not motivating to me. This is, again, because we already were in "debt repayment" mode for 5-6 solid years. There are loan calculators online that would help you figure out how much you'd save in interest if you paid off debt early vs. standard plans.

@DesertDreams88: we’re in a similar spot where before kids I threw a lot of money at debt but now with kids and bills we don’t have much left over. My student loan has 8 payments left and after that I think I’m going to save that money v send it to other debt. Just to have a little breathing room.

@gotkimchi: we had a lot of grad school debt between us. When we graduated we got some floating interest rates and some fixed that were near 3%. Then interest rates fell keeping the floating ones low (below 4%) as well which helped. I did pay extra when I could pre getting married - but then dh was laid off a long time, then we had kids and childcare and then I started staying home so we went back to making the payments for all that time. We try to avoid debt when we can but also have a mortgage where we just make payments. Right now no car payments and saving cash every month since we probably both need new (to us) cars in the next 3 years or so.

Recently though we decided to plow some savings into paying off the two larger amounts of the four left. It felt AMAZING and now we’re snowballing those payments into the last two so they’ll be done in a year or so. Then that money will probably all go into 529s for the kids which we have done very little with so far. So that was the motivator, to get moving on those. We have spent a ton on healthcare the last few years and could never prioritize them it seemed like.

@bhbee: we have had a lot of medical payments too, husband needed wisdom teeth out, both kids had ear tubes, one had adenoid removed, so many appointments, dental work etc. its just life I guess but it has felt hard to make any traction and I do think a break sounds nice! We also have some money in savings and I am considering pay some stuff off when those balances equal each other.