Family Matters: Our Strategy for 2007

Finished my last college exam today! To tell you the truth, this semester has been an annoying 16 weeks but I managed. Anyway, I'm planning on taking ONE class while our child is born and it will only be a 6 week class starting in January so it wont be too close to the arrival of the little one. Great now that we have that out of the way.... heres finances!

First we updated the net worth sheet for December finally. We have been saving like squirrels to make sure this "winter" doesnt make us "hungry" (plug for "over the hedge" :P)... basically is the emergency fund ready for our family in '07. I have been using scratch paper long enough and have put numbers in the spreadsheet. We will have 6 months saved when my wife leaves her job in June to care for our child full time. I figured our average monthly expenses cost $1600, which equate to ~$9600 or rounded to $10,000. Ok, now that we have 10k socked away by June and NOT TOUCHING, I will also have an additional $1600 in our BANKING savings account. We have a single checking and savings account at our local bank. At the beginning of every month I will move $1600 for all our expenses from the savings account to the checking account. Every month, I will "fill up" the savings FIRST with $1600, and then with the rest of our money, we can allocate to whatever catagory.

Here is what we've already accomplished for 2007:
(Estimated based on averages for 2006 but numbers are actual dollars saved)

$2405.63 saved for Home Insurance and Real Estate Tax for 2007
$600.00 saved for 2007 Bimonthly water and sewer costs
$208.00 paid for 2007 + 2008 Vehicle registration for both vehicles
$1400.00 saved so far for 10k emergency fund
$100.00 saved for baby's college fund (LOL its a small start)

This way we will be ready and that $1600 monthly looks more and more realistic because Im not worrying about having to pay these bigger above expenses. For 2007, I'll be opening new catagories for 2008 and maybe put in an extra fund for a NEW used vehicle :). Of course this is after we maximize our retirement, which we have not been maintaining like we should. *tisk tisk* The only good thing is that Ive been contributing my employee match at 6% and our previous 401k rollovers look healthy. Closing out our years of being 25 (wife turns 26 in Jan), we are at $29,796.54 on retirement to date. 4 year outlook, we need to be closer to $100k by age 30, that way compound interest can be our best friend. I like to keep things as SIMPLE as possible. Of course, life happens and we can't be 100% prepared for everything, so lets do the numbers, come as close as we can and just have some fun too!

Side note: start car fund (man that new 07 camry and cr-v look nice!) posted by The American Dollar at 9:29 PM