March End of Month Review

March Goals

• Pay off our personal loan
• Pay off the fourth credit card on the list
• Continue the steps of the Konmari Method
• Drink more water
• Eat better
• Spend time with friends and family
• Work on this site 3 times a week

We did so well in February that we set some lofty goals in March. The first goal of the month was to pay off our personal loan which had a balance of $926. We crushed it! If we had continued to just make the monthly payments we wouldn’t have paid it off for 8 months. This one was huge for our debt snowball. The payment on this was $120 a month. This will now be going toward paying off our credit cards and eventually our student loans each month. This brought our debt snowball amount to $197 a month.

The next thing we wanted to pay off was the fourth credit card on the list. We owed $835 on it at the beginning of the month. It took a little work but we managed to pay it off completely as well. This brought our debt snowball total to $223. We were on such a roll that we immediately started working on paying off the next credit card on the list. The beginning balance was $1,445. We hustled hard and were able to pay $647 toward it. We plan to pay off the remaining $798 in April. I’m shocked that we were able to pay off $2408 in debt in March!

We are working on decluttering our home using the Konmari method. I really enjoyed the book “The life-changing magic of tidying up.” This month we have gone through Ivy’s and my clothing. I will be writing a post about this as soon as we finish with Michael’s clothing. He has been working a ton lately and hasn’t had time to do it. We have started with the paper portion. We have gotten rid of 9 bags of clothing and 3 small bags of paper so far.

I have been drinking much more water and much less soda. The budget-friendly, healthy eating has been going well. We are really working hard to eat well without breaking our weekly food budget. We are eating many more fruits and vegetables. We have eaten much less meat and junk food over the last month. I have been making our weekly meal plan based on which produce is in season and cheap.

We continued to try to spend more time with friends and extended family.

I have been trying very hard to dedicate enough time and effort to this blog to reach my goals. I love writing and I have enjoyed the many aspects of blogging. I love being able to start with a completely blank page and turn it into something I am proud of. I managed to get caught up on loads of posts about past trips this month. I wrote a couple current posts about finance and our journey to becoming debt-free. I set up the contact me page, edited photos, made new connections, and I’m working on a few posts that are not quite up yet. I’m proud of the progress I’m making and will continue to work on this site at least 3 times a week.

I’m so excited to see what we accomplish in April!