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Archive for June, 2014

The Wind in Our Sails

June 28th, 2014 at 05:09 pm

Gosh it's been forever since I wrote! Actually, I did write a post a few months back, but it got deleted accidentally and I was too annoyed to retype it (don't know why, but I always have to post a new entry twice for it to work correctly). Going to be more careful this time!

Part of why I haven't written for a while is that, to be honest, we haven't been working very hard on our TMM since April. We started hubby's 401K at the end of March and are adding the full amount each month to get the maximum company max (6% for us, 4.5% for them). It feels great to have started that, and with the matching it is growing nicely. But it is also untappable money that has really lowered how much extra we have to throw at other goals each month, and that has slowed some of our momentum.

The other thing that has taken some wind out of our sales is medical related, which is what the post that got deleted was about. Basically, our identicals twins have been diagnosed with asperger's (ASD) and we suddenly have very high medical costs that were not factored in to our original planning. Long story short, despite our medical insurance, back in April we thought we were going to start needing about twice as much as we had budgeted for medical expenses each year (including 2013, which we were still getting bills for). So, $10K/yr instead of $5K budgeted. And what with the prior year, the current year, and trying to better prepare for the coming year (2015), we were trying to figure out where the hell to come up with $15K all of a sudden.

We started by getting a no monthly interest balance txfr on a CC for one year (though the txfr itself cost 3% that we paid off right away). Our thinking being that while, yes, it is a credit card, we have regular payroll deductions deposited to our HSA that can be used to pay it off over the course of the year. We also started setting aside an additional $315 each month to be more ready for next year. Which still left us short $5K, but we downgraded our expected May car purchase by $10K to help it all work out better eventually.

The good news, come May we found out that due to having a certified "mental disability", the boys qualify for some federal medical disability funding that is going to help us out. I'm still not sure how it's all going to work out eventually, since everything takes a year and a day to get "processed", but my best guess is that it will be better than our worst fears, but worse than before this all started. In the meantime, we are still working on paying off the CC balance txfr and saving for next year, but we're assuming that the money from the gov't will at least cover last year's extra medical expenses (about $5,900).

Unfortunately, this all began to balloon as we were preparing to make the "new" car purchase we've been planning for over a year now (to replace our 1999 family SUV). Had it not been for already promising my daughter the old SUV come this summer, so that she could look for a summer job over her college break, and sign for a new lease for housing next year without having to be limited by bus transportation issues, we may have tried to put that off for another year. Though in the end, it's probably good that we didn't because within a month of our purchase, the SUV came up with another $1800 in repairs it could use (only $600 of which was decided was worth it, and which has been a good lesson in helping our daughter plan for financial emergencies!).

Anyways, another long story short, we love our new car (which is actually 3 years old, but that's the newest car I've ever owned!). It was about $15K total and we had save about $4K prior to purchase. We also dipped into our emergency fund a little to get our monthly payments down to about $175, which felt safe and doable. We're working on restocking our emergency fund (still about $1800 to go) and plan to pay off whatever balance is remaining on the car come Feb 2015 when hubby gets his annual bonus. The car we got is rated as very reliable and is in great running condition (pre-certified even, and with a 7 year warranty), and I feel like it will be great family car for years to come.

So, it's been a pretty financially disorienting few months. Really hard to gain traction when we're still dealing with some medical unknowns. Looking ahead to about $2350 in tuition/books that will be due in a couple months too for my fall term of school. We have enough if we dip into our emergency fund again, (and I certainly don't want to be taking out any more school loans at this point when we still have $100K of them that we've barely make a dent in), but in all likelihood we will have to, at least a little bit. Hoping that by the end of the summer we'll have a better sense of our financial position again so that we can feel more confident about where we're steering.