2013 Goals: Review of Finances

You can read my original post here where I reflected on our goals for 2013.  Now that we are more than 75% of the way through the year, it's a great time to reflect back on how we've done and fine tune anything we want to do before the end of the year. 
(Side note: We went to Lowe's the other day, and they already had Christmas trees out!  Yikes!  That really made me feel like the end of the year was approaching quickly.  PS-There are 80 days until Christmas?!!?? What?!?)   Back on track.....

Essentially our 2 main goals by the end of this year were:

1.  Pay off our Envoy. 
I am proud to report that we were able to use our tax return to pay off our Envoy.  We had most of it payed off, but it would have been very easy to just continue to make payments and for us to use that money on something else much less critical.  It has been such a blessing to free up about $250 per month of income.  Yay!  I'm already dreaming up how we can be good stewards of next year's tax return?? 

2.  Develop and maintain a spending plan. 
This goal has been much trickier to implement and maintain.  For us, we can write a spending plan any day, but the harder part is actually sticking to it.  My medical bills have really always varied so much that it was hard for us to ever feel like we knew how much to save from month to month.  

I have been reading the Words of Williams blog for several years now, and I love their intentional approach to their finances.  Because of their blog, I have wanted to put together a spending plan for a while now.  Like I said, the problem was always sticking to it.  They actually just wrote a post on that; click here to read it. 

Anyhow, we did meet with a financial advisor back in April and May to help us get on the right path.  Since then we have tracked ALL of our expenses and have created a spending plan that we have stuck to!  This is quite an accomplishment for us.  Our advisor also talked us through his suggestions for us that align with Dave Ramsey's baby steps. 

Probably the turning point for me was when I found the William's free Excel spreadsheet that they received when they went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University class.  This spreadsheet helped us to not only keep track of our expenses, but it also helped me to understand our cash flow throughout the month since MK gets paid twice a month on the 1st and 15th, while I am paid biweekly (so my paychecks are not on consistent days of the month but they do come in consistently...this can make things interesting when bills are always due on certain days of the month, but my paycheck does not come in on a routine day of the month).  Anyhow, I have just LOVED using it, and it is the only thing we have ever been consistent at using for longer than a month.  Hurray!

So, overall I would say we have been successful in meeting our goals.  Now, the interesting thing is that just as we are getting this budgeting and spending plan thing rolling, we are going to throw a new member of the family into the mix! Ha! Needless to say, some modifications will DEFINITELY be in order when Baby K arrives, but that's ok!