In all seriousness, we spent a lot of money this month, and nearly all of our spending was a draw down of cash that we had expressly saved for this purpose. Rental repairs and taxes, home property taxes, car insurance, a new roof, and of course, the finger incident all hit the pocketbook this month.
The greatest part of this month is that I never felt any stress about the money leaving our accounts. It was all planned, it was as if it had already been spent. In fact, I had a little victory when I managed to get some $700 saved by paying for the finger in cash, and the fact that our car insurance only went up by $12 (which doesn't warrant a phone call with our insurance company, rather than our expected $100 (at which point we would begin the car insurance hunt again)).
Without further ado- a spending and net worth update!
Clocking in at a cool $11,646.09, we had our spendiest month in the history of months where we haven't bought a house. Obviously, the house renovation spending is our biggest line item. We managed to pay someone to put a new roof on our house. This is significant because I was under the assumption that re-roofing houses was such a miserable task (in 100 degree weather no less), that it would require a pledge of all our worldly goods both present and future. Instead, these guys took a mere $4300 and did the job in less than a day. Who would have thought? We also bought a refrigerator ($1100). The retail value of our new fridge is $3K. The paradox of owning a $3K fridge in our $65K home is not lost on me. I'm considering adding it as a line item in our net worth (note- this is a lie). The worst money we spent this month was for the finger incident. But luckily a few (dozen) phone calls was all it took to lower our bills. And we're now $1400 towards our deductible which will come in handy this year ;) |
Net Worth $471,242 up $990
I have finally invested the HSA. There is no minimum order amount, but in order to have an automatic investment set up, you'll need at least $1000. I plan to log in every 2-3 months to put in an order of $500. For those who are curious, all the investment choices are Vanguard funds with all fees covered by my company. I was shocked to get such a good deal. The funds include bond and index funds, of which I chose an index fund. We intend to build this account up as much as possible since it's got so many tax advantages (not to mention zero fees on something we might buy anyhow), and we have robust cash flow right now.
As always, I'm keeping both properties at their book values. These won't be updated until we sell them.
Looking ahead, we will continue to spend a lot of our cash (approximately $10K) more before we stop renovating unless the kitchen does us in, and we have a few discretionary expenses on our horizon including tickets to Minnesota to visit our families, a new phone for my husband, new glasses, and more.
Our after tax investing will be weak in August, but we hope to rebound again in September-December.
Will the Unplanned Finance Family ever pass $500K, we hope that it will happen in this lifetime (and if some member of the family wasn't so insistent upon living in a fancy house (okay that member is me), we would probably pass it this year).