November End of Month Review 2018

November Goals

• $1500 on credit card #9
• Christmas Shopping
• Isabella’s Birthday
• Continue Decluttering

Our finances took a bit of a hit this month. Ivy, our oldest, had to have oral surgery to remove her wisdom teeth. It was almost $1,300 after insurance for everything. We had a few options for how to go about paying for this and after some discussion we made a decision. We chose to use a credit card with a 1.99% interest rate. We could have paid for it in cash but decided to take the cash we would have spent and put it toward credit card #9 as planned. The interest rate on card #9 is 24.9%. We thought it made more sense to do it this way. Hopefully, we made the right choice. We have never done this before but it seemed like a good idea. We intend to pay off credit card #9 and then pay off her dental work. Card #10 has 0% interest until June so it will be the last one we pay off. We were able to pay the $1500 as planned on card #9 so we did make our goal even though it was not as planned.

We finished the majority of our Christmas shopping. I still need to pick up some stocking stuffers. We are planning to use up the Christmas wrapping paper, gift tags, and bows that we have left from last year before buying anything new.

We booked Isabella’s birthday party and ordered the food. We still have to place her cake order on Tuesday and make her gift bags. She is really excited.

We have continued our decluttering. Octavia (2 years old) recently hit a major growth spurt so I have been cleaning out her clothing. It started with just sitting aside things that didn’t fit when she tried them on but a few days ago it took seven tries to find a pair of pants that fit so I did a major purge. It was driving me crazy not knowing if I was going to be able to easily locate clothing that fit when I needed to get her ready. A very good friend that is basically family brought her a load of hand-me-downs in the next size up. I spent a couple of days washing and folding/hanging up her new clothing. It looks like all she will need to get through winter is a coat. That’s not too bad! I appreciate the hand-me-downs so much. She has been dropping things off since Octavia was born and I know it has saved us a small fortune over the last couple years.

My husband and I went through our pans. We got rid of the ones that were in bad shape. We decided on exactly which ones we need to replace and which we could live without. My Dad was asking what to get us for Christmas and we told him about the two pans that we needed to replace since we were going to buy them anyway. We do not need to add any extra junk to our home as we continue to rid ourselves of all the excess.

It was a bumpy month but we continued to make progress. We have one more month of 2018 to make a final push. Make sure you stick around. There are some big things coming in 2019 and some even bigger things coming in 2020!