pay for my ESL practica in cash

I guess I already made a long entry about this, so I won’t bore my dear subscribers. In essence, I have this saved, need to feel like I’m accomplishing something, and won’t actually turn the money over to anyone for three more months, so I’m counting it close enough to done to give myself a checkoff. Woohoo! If I spend it on something else, I’ll have to reopen the goal!!

for spring or summer semester. I don’t know which yet, so I had better be ready for if I want it to be in spring. That means I need $1000 by Feb. Should be fine barring some catastrophe.

I have $1073 saved for tuition and fall tuition will be $1018. Excellent.

Puts me to $866. I believe I have enough to do it this summer rather than in the fall.

to my tuition fund. If I hadn’t committed to paying off my debt faster (which means putting all my snowflakes toward debt) (I’m considering this tuition obligation a debt to myself), I would only have like $350 right now but instead I am up to $516 . . .

to this fund. Almost at $500 now. This will help because I’m going to push up the date for this experience, I think – summer v. fall.

It has been super helpful to separate out my tuition into a separate fund. I am up to $408 in the fund (out of about $2000 needed). I am plopping in a large chunk from my salary plus routing my snowflakes (new term!! All that found money that comes my way) to this fund. I just put $57.78 in there from Amazon sales. I had been tempted to think of this small change as travel money but if it sits in my checking account it will be blown. Plus, the tuition is higher priority than the travel.

I looked at this today and at this rate, I will have exactly enough to pay for my tuition if I don’t spend the money on anything else. The problem up until now is that I’ve had my emergency fund and tuition fund lumped together, so some months I was wiping out what I was contributing when I was raiding the fund for “emergencies,” some legit, some not. I have now separated them out and will direct the bulk of the funds to the tuition account. This will be just enough to pay the tuition, but my emergency fund will not be where I want it. Oh well, I guess I will have to be ok with what I already have saved in the EF. Once I get my pay raise in September maybe I can take the difference and slap it toward tuition. Or, I can maybe take a small bit out of the emergency fund if I don’t get enough for tuition. Geez. It’ll be nice to be out of this tight budget – but then I’m planning on diverting the funds to debt repayment! So it’ll still be just as tight! Oh well, such is life . . .

I need to do four credits of practica in ESL to finish the license, even though my master’s will be done. I need to do this in the fall for a few reasons: 1) If I don’t, I may never do it. 2) My loans will remain deferred longer, enabling me to pay off other debts before they come due, and then being able to hit them with big payments. 3) It’ll just get more expensive the longer I wait.

I’m going to leave this one toward the bottom of the list, but I have to remember that the money must be left alone for this purpose, or I will come up short. The good news is that saving on my current schedule, I will have enough. And since we’re going to get a small pay boost, that means the belt won’t be quite as tight (or, I can save a little more to use for emergencies, etc.).