Except mine involves a lot less killing.
So with my new job I have to travel to Nebraska at the beginning of every month. This month, on the 2 1/2 hour plane ride, I decided to figure a few things out with my finances.
First off, I came to the realization that whenever I drew up a budget in the past, it was always because I had to do it in order to get out of debt. I rarely, if ever, drew one up for what I would like my finances to look like. I didn’t take into account some of the things that I know that I’m going to wind up spending money on anyway. I wanted to change that a bit.
Also, a few other goals I have come into play a bit. I’m hoping that my mom will be able to move in with me for a few months out of the year. Currently, she lives in Salt Lake, and I live in Phoenix, so I think she’d enjoy getting out of the cold weather during the winter. Before that happens, I need to get into a house, and I’ll need a bunch of furniture—Moving from a one bedroom apartment into a 3 bed, 2 bath house is going to leave a lot of space that needs filling. Also, I’d like to have an emergency fund saved up.
My first goal, as I mentioned previously, is to have my car and three other small debts paid off all at the same time. That seems easy, and should be pretty automatic, so long as I don’t have any setbacks. Provided everything goes as planned, I’ll have that debt out of the way by the time I pay off my car in April 2014.
After that, I want to save up for an emergency fund and furniture. I figure with the small debts out of the way (and my car), I should be able to put all of the money for those payments towards savings, so it should go relatively quickly. I think I can save up $10k for an emergency fund and $16k for furniture by January 2016.
After that, I think I’ll be in the home stretch. I’ll only have my student loans and two credit cards left to pay off before moving into a house. Since I don’t want to move in the middle of summer (in Phoenix!) I’ll wait until October or November to find a house to rent. By that time, taking into consideration the money that I’ll need for deposits and moving, I’ll have only about $3-4k left to pay off on credit cards. That should be gone by the new year of 2017.
I’m really happy I sat down and figured this out. It’s going to take a while, but at least I’ve got a path out of debt, and will be a more financially secure. That’s a huge relief—I was worried that I would never be able to pay all this off. 5 months ago