Tell All Tuesday ~ March In Review
March was an interesting month. This is the first month since my contracting position ended abruptly in October that we got completely back on track with diverting all of the blogging and other “alternative” income, save tutoring, solely to debt reduction. In November and December, that income had to fill the gap left by the contracting position, and then in January and February it was diverted in part or in whole to the car repairs. In March, only my spouse’s salary and my tutoring income were put into our budget to meet expenses, while all other income was snowflaked to my spouse’s student loan or put into the student loan payoff savings fund to snowflake in April. Which had an interesting result:
- All sources of inflow exceeded all sources of outflow (including money to savings or snowflaking) by $289.72.
- We need to carry over $201.45 for irregular expenses into April.
- That leaves a $88.27 surplus, it seems.
However, that inflow includes a $100 check I received yesterday for my birthday from my parents. That is going to be moved to a savings account until I decide what I want to do with it (in the spirit of giving myself wiggle room) so in fact, we’re actually $11.73 away from having a balanced budget this month. Which honestly, is better than I expected. I wasn’t able to tutor as much in February as I did in January and only earned ~$400 instead of $600. Since the budget depends on me bringing in $500/month to contribute to the budget to be able to have enough to carry over month to month for irregular expenses, the fact that it didn’t balance is not surprising, and only came so close because I was able to really cut back some other categories, especially the miscellaneous one. We did spend less than we earned, but we don’t have quite enough left over to cover what we need to save in our irregular categories. So we’ll have to save an additional $11.73 in April for irregular expenses.
We’ll be in the same position in April as we were in March, I again only earned about $400 from tutoring, so I may have to divert $100 of the taekwondo income to our budget. Since taekwondo is what is causing me to be able to tutor less than I was, it is the obvious place to make up the budget shortfall.
As far as the debt reduction front, I was able to transfer $98.48 to the student loan payoff fund, which brings the total in that fund to $214.48. Since it is the beginning of the month, I will be receiving payouts for different blog-related revenue this week, so I am hoping to be able to make another $1000 payment to the student loan next week (budgeted minimum of $437.59 plus ~$550-600 of alternative income). That will bring the student loan total to a 4 figure number. Hurrah!
Looking ahead, we should receive our economic stimulus check in the first half of May, and May is also one of my spouse’s two “three paycheck” months. Since I will be bringing in taekwondo income at that point as well, I am cautiously optimistic that we may be able to pay $4000 towards the student loan that month. That would put a huge dent in that debt and bring us a whole lot closer to being able to focus on our other financial goals. It is almost scary for me to even think too hard about being able to make that happen. But first, we will enjoy April. 
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April 1st, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Man, I am starting to think I should treat my three paycheck months as ‘extra’. Since I get paid every two weeks, I budget on a two week cycle (I write down when I’ll get paychecks, take out expenses that occur on a weekly basis, and then fill in my bills in the gaps). Doing this though, I never end up with “extra” money even on a three check month.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Hooray! I hope April is a fantastic month for you. May looks to be even better!
April 1st, 2008 at 4:40 pm
We use my biweekly paychecks as paycheck1 and paycheck2. We have designated what needs to be paid out of each one. Therefore, we are slowly getting to the point where the payments are being paid a week earlier and some even a whole month early so its working well to pay debt this way. It’s giving us some “wiggle” room when an unexpected expense occurs. It only hurts when we have to remember the electric bill, water, etc that can’t be paid every other bi-week but for debt its working great.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 pm
@ Brandon - we budget on a “month” basis and so we treat those two additional paychecks as extra - think of it as a sort of forced savings plan. You get used to living on a little less every month and two times a year you get a big payout you can put to work for you