Wordless Wednesday- Car vs Guardrail

Posted on January 15, 2014 by Sheila

Goals for 2014

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Sheila

Today, I am caught up!! The last two weeks have been some of the busiest I can remember but finally we are caught up! I realized however that I had not posted my goals for this year.

I am going to address these a little differently than I have in the past. My financial goals will change month by month, my intent is that I have an overall goal for the year and then I can adjust each month to meet the goals.

Financial Goals– 1. Pay off lawn mower by March 2014 to avoid interest being charged. Current status $801.51 remaining. Plan to pay $100 in both January and February with remaining $600 to come from expected tax refund.
2. Emergency Fund to $2000. Current status $0. Plan to add $100 a month for first 5 months of the year, then $200 remaining 7 months.
3. Groceries: Spend $600 a month
4. Gas: Spend $400 a month with any remaining to be move to Auto fund for repairs.
These are some high goals but I really need to get our finances under control this year and stop living pay check to pay check. My monthly goals for January I have already post as part of the low spend/No Spend challenge. I don’t anticipate meeting all the goals due to our trip but I do hope to achieve at least 50% of them!

Blogging: Goal: 15 per month Currently I am at 50% for 2013.

Weight: Goal to exercise 3x a week and to be down to 150 by December 2014. Currently I am nowhere near this goal. To met I need to lose 6# a month. I am going to focus of drinking water and getting the exercise in.

So there are my objectives in writing. Do you have any goals or by this 11th day of January have they already changed?

Budget and Traveling

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Sheila

Two weeks ago, I had just signed up to be part of Carla’s challenge of Low/ No Spend January. You can see the goals I set here. However just a few short days later we decided to make a trip to Michigan to visit family. After looking at the goals again, I am going to see if I can at least manage to achieve a couple prior to the end of the month. Since I definitely don’t have an update today, I am going to talk a little about our travel budget instead.

Because this is a trip that we had not initially budgeted for, we felt very strongly that we needed to set and stick to a budget. January is one of the two months this year that I will receive an extra check, so this was part of the basis for the budget. I am excited to say that even after paying for the new tail lights on the van that were needed because of our wreck that we are $50 under budget!!!! I have decided that this will be placed in our auto fund to meet one of the low spend goals of the month!

Here is a breakdown of our spending:
Gas and tolls    $350
Hotel                 $285
Food                $185 (We were treated to several meals by family, but also took with us several meals to reheat. We also packed lots of drinks and snacks)
Bronner’s       $115
Replacement parts $106

Total Spent $1050 for a 4 day trip! I am so proud that we stuck to our budget!

The Worst Travel Day EVER!

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Sheila

I have been travelling between North Carolina and Michigan, for over 10 years now. I have made this 800 mile journey probably 15 times but the worst trip ever occurred last week. The adventure started early in the evening when I was woken up half an hour earlier than plan by the sound of Kendall coughing and throwing up. I really didn’t give it much thought because I had made her eat earlier when she was not hungry. After we loaded up it was off to Krispy Kreme for our late night snack. Unfortunately, I had made a mistake and we missed closing my 20 minutes. Next was an usual chain of events that caused a relatively long trip become a really really unforgettable trip. Our GPS sent us on a totally different route than we had ever take, we have since discovered that by mistake we told it to avoid toll roads. We headed west to Tennessee, I will spare all of us the details but Kendall was sick twice more in the first four hours. Matt and I had a serious discussion about turning around and heading home but Kendall did not want to because in her logic ” We have packed everything in the van for the trip.” The route itself was very twisting and turning, it felt like we were in the mountains for ever. Our most uneventful period was between 4am and 9am. We stopped and ate at Cracker Barrel around 6am and thought okay we are about half way with the additional stops we should be at the hotel around 2pm. Things turned from long to worse in Kentucky around 9:30 when it started to snow heavily. In the next 6 hours we travelled less than 200 miles in terrible condition that included “white outs” and long periods of sitting waiting on wrecks to clear. At around 5pm we made it to Ann Arbor and discovered that the further north we headed the better the travel and weather appeared to be. So we decided to continue on. We arrived at our hotel around 8:30pm a mere 22 and half hours after we left! We were both exhausted!

I am completing this post after our travel back to North Carolina on Sunday January 5th. The weather was again awful for travel and we ended up in a wreck in Ohio. Our van hit a patch of ice, did a couple of circles, hit a guardrail. The van was driveablel l will post pictures next week, however we managed to arrive home in 16 hours and so the trip to Michigan remains the worst Travel day EVER!