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Archive for January, 2016

2016: The Year to Coast

January 4th, 2016 at 08:55 pm

After the chaos of 2015 with all the changes (job, apartment, fixer upper house, children's health, husband at school), I'm determined that my motto this year is to "coast".

I have no 2015 financial recap. My tracking was horrendous. I do know I've added a LOT more debt, and I'm just going to coast on it for awhile as I have very little brain capacity to do otherwise. As long as I keep working at least part-time, we will only be adding student loan debt (to be paid back by his work upon good grades).

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So my goals for 2016 are going to be quite simple:
1) Keep under or close to last month's income
2) Keep everything on the sane side of chaos (aka do just enough chores/activities/organizing/etc)
3) No new debt

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My goals for January are:
1) Stay under last month's income (minus extra paycheck) - this will be hard as somehow we spent a third of the budget in the first three days.

2) Pack lunch daily - this will be easier as I have to pack my son's lunch for his autism therapy sessions

3) Try to do something for myself at least once a week - This will be really hard as I'm not guarenteed I'll get time to myself, so it might just have to be a splurge food.

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Also, a quick update on my kids: The older has done really well with speech. It's really popping now, so I'm absolutely beyond thrilled. Insurance has paid for everything, which is awesome! He's going into an intense OT/Speech therapy for a month, then we'll transition to an at home therapy with some OT/Speech sessions sprinkled throughout the week. The younger... well, he's walking and happy, but... we don't think he can hear a single thing. So yet another medical thing we are looking into for him. Until the hearing test, I'm upping my sign language skills. He's not latching onto it yet, but I can tell he's liking that I'm working on interacting more in his visual plane. I'm definitely going to be hitting my deductible early. Thankfully that's where my extra paycheck (of the month AND year) went to - the HSA. Have I mentioned that I love HSA's? Because I do. A lot. :-p