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End Of Year Finance Check

November 23, 2022 If it wasn't so cold out right now, we might not believe that the end of the year is fast approaching, but alas – it is! With that, we have been starting to crunch our numbers and see if we met our savings and debt payoff goals for this year and are starting to make some savings goals for next year. To assist with this, we have also started looking at what are current expenses are, current loan and credit card rates and seeing where we might be able to cut additional costs by either canceling services, negotiating costs and/or switching companies. While we don't necessarily like to switch companies for our credit cards/loans, car or home insurance, etc... we have noticed a spike in these costs when evaluating our bills over the last month. For instance, one of our credits cards' interest rates doubled in the last month or two, going from 9.9% to 19.9%! When chatting with our coach last week, we brought up how we have seen this change in interest rates and she did confirm the market (interest) rates are indeed increasing and she encouraged us to look into closing some cards with high rates, and for any that carry balances, look into transferring to another company that can offer low transfer rates with 0% APR for X number of months. An additional piece of advice that she gave us, which we were not aware of, is that you never want to close your old credit card, as that is what your credit history started with. With that, since Krystal's oldest credit card is the one with the interest rate that doubled, she will not be using it and putting a freeze on it for a security protection. Looking into next year, we're creating some lists for travel ideas and doing some research to see what the costs (car or airfare, hotels, etc...) for those trips would be and creating budgets for each scenario. Thanks to our coach, a few months ago we had a second savings account set up that we've designated to be our 'travel savings account', where we can easily keep track of our budget for this specific purpose. If your bank allows you to easily open up an additionally savings account easily, I would highly recommend this as it has been a game changer to better keep track of the savings we allocate for travel, which allows us to keep on track. Also in 2023, we would like to start family planning, which also means that we need to get our wedding plan finalized very soon. (For those that ask us the million dollar "when are you getting married?" question, we will have an answer for you soon!). Why the delay in planning you might ask? Well, not only did the pandemic put a halt in our plans, we also each have a semi-large immediate family and also both have very-large extended families. Due to this, it has been a bit tricky to nail down exactly what we wish for our wedding to look like and where to make cuts, in order to stay within our budget. For anyone that has experienced something like this and has some wedding planning and budgeting tips to share – please send them our way! While this season of Project Money is nearing to a close in 6ish weeks, we know that the new outlook in our financial planning is just beginning and we look forward to putting our new mindset to use for 2023 (and beyond!). You might also be interested in Whew and wow! This has been quite a challenging and eye-opening process! It has been very hard to do this project as part of a couple when both of us appear to handle finances and money very differently. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you can start out with very similar goals and desires but unless you are actually working hard towards them each week, they aren’t easy to maintain collectively! While we probably aren’t in last place, we sure aren’t in first either and that's okay. During the week of November 23, we wrote about how we were going to look into options for cost-saving measures. One of those measures was to analyze any balance transfers that may have been available to us. One of this balance transfers ended up being a very good offer, 0% interest for 18 months with a 3% transfer fee. It was time to take a couple small balances and one larger balance and combine them into what will be one card payment using this balance transfer offer. This past weekend, we took our annual trip down to Chicago, which was also paired with a trip to the theater. With being in Project Money, have been more conscious of our trip expenses and we heavily discussed if we just go down for just the evening or spend the night, like we normally do. With traffic and the unknowns of early winter weather, we decided it would be best to spend the night down there, and so we did. Something that stands out lately are the number of outlets competing for one’s time, attention, and especially our hard earned money. I don’t know about you, but it can be exhausting dodging solicitations and avoiding temptation left and right, especially around the holidays! It seems I can’t make a move without a text, email, phone call, commercial, mailer, advertisement, etc. attempting to draw me in on the next latest, greatest thing I supposedly ‘need’ to buy. Ah, consumerism. If it wasn't so cold out right now, we might not believe that the end of the year is fast approaching, but alas – it is! With that, we have been starting to crunch our numbers and see if we met our savings and debt payoff goals for this year and are starting to make some savings goals for next year. To assist with this, we have also started looking at what are current expenses are, current loan and credit card rates and seeing where we might be able to cut additional costs by either canceling services, negotiating costs and/or switching companies. Initially, we weren’t sure exactly what to write about for this week’s blog post. However, the subject came to us this past weekend as we were reviewing certain aspects of our finances. We both have credit card debt we are working on paying off and recently made sizable progress towards that goal. However, we’ve noticed that our low interest credit cards have recently experienced additional hikes in their APRs (and appear to continue climbing). For example, one credit card has now climbed to from 9.9% to 15.85% due to varying APR with the market based on the Prime Rate. Many of us enjoy hosting parties with friends and family for seasonal activities and Holidays but don’t want to break the bank doing so! For me and Krystal, a Fall Halloween event is one of our favorite gatherings we host each year with close loved ones. Here are some of our money-saving tips to ensure sure the fun doesn’t become overshadowed by ghastly receipts! I don't know about you, but I, Krystal, grew up in a pretty cold house during winter. We lived in a rural-ish area where natural gas did not run, thus propane was our main heating source, until my father installed a wood stove when I was late middle-school age. Nevertheless, the heat in our house was turned down low (better for breathing we were always told, too!) while we slept and were away at work or school. One thing we’re still working through is being a bit more proactive about unexpected house costs. Sure, we have small savings account for house expenses, but mostly this is to cover our homeowner’s insurance deductible. Like my father taught me with my car insurance deductible, I try to pretend this money just doesn’t exist, thus, why we need to plan better for those unexpected house-related costs.  This week’s two unexpected costs were our dryer needing a repair and our fence project taking a lot more money than expected. 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