May End of Month Review
May Goals
- Finish paying off the 6th credit card on the list
- Pay toward our 7th credit card
- Finish something on our list of home remodeling
- Air Conditioner
- Sell Some Stuff
- Finish the Pantry Challenge
- Continue Decluttering
- Break Down Long-Term Goals and Plans
We started off the month with a balance of $765.29 on credit card #6. We were able to pay it off. This was our only accomplishment on our debt payoff plan in May. We had a busy and draining month. It drained us both physically and financially. The air conditioner going out was just as big of a nightmare as we thought it was going to be. We started by buying two window units which set us back over $300 but did give us time to figure out our next move. We knew when we bought them that they were only a temporary fix but we needed time to come up with the best plan. We do intend to sell them and recoup part of the cost.
Replacing our central air was a nightmare but we definitely went with the best option. We had an older furnace so it needed to be replaced too. It was still functional but a new one would ensure that we were not dealing with the potential loss of heat and will increase our resell value. We intend to sell our house in a couple years so that was also a consideration. It was cheaper to buy the furnace and air conditioner unit together. We did most of the work ourselves which helped to offset a lot of the cost. We did have to take out a personal loan for $6,000. We didn’t want to do it but our savings were not going to cover it. We got a decent interest rate and we are going to pay it off after we finish paying off our credit cards.
We didn’t do anything else around our house. We didn’t sell anything. We were honestly just too busy to think about anything but the air conditioner, work, and finishing out the end of the school year. We didn’t finish the pantry challenge but we are back at it again. We mainly ate easy to prepare foods like salads, sandwiches, and fruit. We didn’t want to cook too much because it made the house hotter. Our kids were sick this month which added to the drama. It was quite a mess of a month.
We did continue to declutter. Each of our daughters has a memory book that is a drop-in style scrapbook. We started going through our photo and memory boxes to try to organize and make sense of things. Our goal is to make the things that are truly important to us easier to access and to store them in a better manner.
We have started to figure out the details of our long-term plans so that we are better able to see our path. We want to break the big steps down into smaller portions the same way we did with our debt-free journey. We broke our debt down into individual debts and worked out the order to pay them in that made the most sense. We also broke that down into monthly goals. It has made that process so much easier that we decided to apply it to the other aspects of our long-term plan.
It was a crazy month but we survived to fight another one.