Busy

I keep disappearing. I want to write more, but I just haven't had time. I am studying in an attempt to take the last part of my certification in December. It's not going very well, so I am a little stressed.

On the financial side . . . I decided to take a decent chunk out of my savings account and pay off my car loan today!!! This was my 24th payment. I am very proud of myself. My savings account only has about 3.7 months of emergency funds in it. This will increase quickly now though because I have not been contributing to it for the past few months since I have been putting it all on my car loan.

MIA

Sorry I disappeared for awhile. Life has been very busy lately. I haven't been feeling all that great after a very busy summer. I was on vacation a week ago. It was nice to get away, but it's hard to get back on track. I was doing really well with not spending too much and working out every day prior to being gone. I got sick towards the end of vacation. I haven't been able to shake it since we got back. I even went to the doctor and he couldn't really find anything out.

I sent in a large payment towards my car last week. I paid an extra $1,225!! I really hope to get this paid off by January. This assumes no large, unexpected expenses come up. I am planning to take some out of savings next month to pay even more extra. I just want this done! I will be able to build back up my savings account quickly after it's paid off. I currently have $15,200 in savings. My goal is to have $15,000 in savings in May 2010 even after paying off my car. I think this is possible. I will have paid off my car in 2 years if I can do this.

I have only bought on sale items over the past two months. There are such good sales out there right now, that I don't think I should have to pay full price for anything. I got a few items for summer on clearance with an extra 20% off the clearance price. I did spend money on the vacation, but it was well worth it. I just needed to get away for awhile. It was about $400 for 5 days away.

New Paycheck

I now know my new paycheck amount after all of the changes recently. It was about what I expected. Based on this new amount, I should be able to save about $800 per month. I am very excited about this. The majority of this savings will be going towards paying off my car. I am still hoping to pay it off in January unless something changes. I currently have about $14k in total in my savings account. I will not be adding a lot to this each month. Instead I plan to just pay extra on my car each month.

I am hoping that having a roommate will not increase my spending too much. So far we've both been too busy to do anything together. I just need to be upfront that I can't do a lot of things that cost too much just like in the past. My main focus over the next few years is working hard in my career and saving money. I still am not sure where I want to end up, but I am also not set on staying where I am now. I would love to live in Charlotte, Denver, or San Diego. I think San Diego is out due to the high cost of living though. In order to reach my goal of moving, I need to save as much as I can so I am comfortable moving elsewhere and can afford to.

Updates

I updated my sidebars. All of my funds have increased expect for the house down payment fund. I was planning to start contributing to this, but my plans changed. I decided to work aggressively to pay off my car. I am hoping to have it paid off two years from now. After that I will focus on saving for a house.

I have money saved for a trip, but I don't plan on going anywhere anytime soon. At least I have the money if I decide to!

I picked up a few groceries today and got gas. It was under $25 for three quarters of a tank!! How exciting. I am not planning to go anywhere tomorrow because it's going to be cold and windy here with a change of flurries. That means no more spending this weekend for me. I will have to get a few more groceries sometime this week because I only bought produce today. I still have $13 in my food budget for this week, so that's fine. I hope they have some good deals in the ads tomorrow.