October was an interesting month. We've made a lot of progress, but we're also relaxing a bit on some things. As usual, taxes and rent ate up about 40% of our income (which really isn't terrible). Gas was up, again. Groceries and Dinging Out were up slightly. However with winter coming, we'll probably see that go down a bit as we eat a lot of soup in the winter and soup is cheap. If you notice in the sidebar, the savings numbers actually went down. That's entirely because I made a decision to keep a buffer in the checking account. I've been a bit overly aggressive with moving extra money to Savings, so things have gotten a bit tight when small, unexpected things come up. So what I did was put $500 in the checking account, and then enter a $500 expense on Jan 1, 2007. So that $500 doesn't appear in my running balance. So there's always $500 more in the checking account than what I think there is. Just a safety net so that I can be more comfortable being aggressive with savings.
We'll finish Christmas and Vacation funds this month, and that will leave us with our more long-term goals for savings. Aiden's Headstone is a priority, and we'll probably have that money in place by the end of the year. (Obviously we'll then have to wait till at least spring to get it placed.) After that, one of the student loans needs to get paid off quickly, then it's retirement and house down payment to work on. With almost $40K in student loans still on the table, I'm happy to report that the net worth balance I'm showing is almost $3000 in the black! (granted most of that is in my 401k, so it's not accessible.
Obviously, we're still planning on a child somewhere in the not-too-distant future, so that will shuffle things up a bit. But now it's an issue of delaying our goals at worst, rather than having to choose between them.
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