I don’t really follow Suze Orman, but I think her new advice is good advice. Now is definitely the time to start saving as much as you can, and only make the minimum payments on debt. With all the layoffs and companys that have closed, it’s scary not to have a well funded Emergency Fund. I only make the basic payments on my debt now. The rest goes to savings. I also just consolidated my student loans again. I had consolidated my original student loans when I was in college the first time. I hadn’t done anything with the new loans I had when I started school the second time. Through the consolidation, I will save an extra $40 a month. My payment is changing from $187.28 to $141.61. This is a very good thing for me.
Posts tagged Emergency Fund
Updates
My Emergency Fund has now officially met goal!!! It’s total is $1144.62. This makes me very very happy. Now I’m going to start working on my Freedom Account. So far it has a total of $75.97. It should be over $100 before the end of the week. I have some money to move around. More good news, is that my only credit card balance is now $1130.00. That’s not as low as I want it to be, but it’s good. I’m sure my tax refund will be enough to cover this amount in full, but I plan to have it decreased by then. I need to get it all paid off before March 2009 or else I’ll end up paying a bunch of extra interest. And now for my final bit of good news, well maybe it’s not really good news, but one less thing I have to spend money on… My gym membership contract is up. The gym staff called me to ask me to renew my contract, but I was working. I’ve been planning to let it run out & not renew it, but I wasn’t sure if my mom was going to let her’s run out as well. After talking to her last night, we’ve decided not to renew, at least not until the spring. So there’s another $89/month that I won’t have to spend! But that also means that I really need to start working out at home. I’ve been so lazy lately. Some of it has been due to all the craziness at work, but most of it is just plain laziness. We have a perfectly good treadmill in the basement that I can start walking/running on now that it’s getting cold. I just have to find the motivation to do it.
Emergency Fund Update
Since I’ve had a few days worth of over-time, I’ve decided to go ahead and use the excess money, plus the money from my (soon to be over) part-time job, and finish funding my Emergency account. So as of Monday Nov. 3rd, my Emergency Fund will be over $1000!!!! Woohoo!! I’m very very excited. Now I can start working on building up my Car Maintenance account, which I’ve decided to change over to a Freedom Account thanks to Beachgirl’s Budget Blog. It makes much more since to make this into an account that covers all the occasional/in-frequent expenses in my life – like car insurance/registration/maintenance, clothing, vet bills/other pet-related expenses (other than food), etc. Some of these items will be fixed amounts, but some will be variable, so I’ll need to estimate. I plan to start putting my FA binder together this weekend and trying to make sure I remember to include all my random expenses. Wouldn’t want to miss any!
Savings Goals
There is the current situation on my savings accounts:
Emergency Fund – Goal = $1000.00 / Current = $796.28
Car Maintenance Fund – Goal $500.00 / Current = $100.59
Regular Savings – Current = $35.65
I don’t keep much in my regular savings & the reason for that is because the interest rate is not very good. Plus I’m still trying to get my Emergency & Car Funds fully funded first. Then I would like to start an Emergency Pet Fund for any unexpected things that might happen to my dogs. Also I would like to start a Vacation Fund so that one day maybe I’ll actually be able to afford to go on a real vacation. It would be nice.
Savings
I have a few small savings accounts. They all serve different purposes. I actually need to set up another as a “Pet” fund for my dogs’ vet & other expenses. Here’s what I have so far:
Regular Savings: $85.42
Emergency Fund: $657.23
Car Funds (Insurance, Registration, & Maintenance): $184.09 – this one is soon to be $334.09 once I can transfer the $150 I set aside from my most recent paycheck
My car insurance is due at the end of this month, so I’ve been tightening other expenses in order to have enough to pay the amount in full. I like paying in full to get the discount, rather than paying extra for making partial payments. Also, then I only have to worry about it twice a year, rather than having to keep track of another bill each month. I currently have a set amount being direct deposited into my car fund. In order to avoid having this problem in the future. Actually, after doing some math, I need to increase that direct deposit.
