Feed items

My wife and I financed the purchase of our new home five years ago.  We are working hard and paying off our mortgage early.  Our goal is to own our home in less than ten years.

I use a simple pie-chart to track our progress. Having a visualization keeps us motivated and excited about the progress we are making.

We purchased our home in February of 2010. Hopefully, we’ll pay it off in less than 10 years – which is our stretch goal – but as of right now, we have shaved 6 months off of the length of the loan. Our progress was slowed, just a bit, when I changed jobs, but we are back – on-track – making principal-only payments on a regular basis.

Here’s a chart with details for our current progress –

The percentages above represent the amount of our mortgage we have paid – 27.76% – and the amount we still owe – 72.24%.

Taking a lesson from the list-making Mrs. NCN, here’s what I want to get done, this week, before the kids head back to school –

Organize Large Storage Spaces

We have four large storage spaces – our shed, our attic, our garage, and our laundry room.  The shed serves as a mini-workshop and storage space.  We like to keep our garage nice and neat, with a small area dedicated for storing kids’ bikes and outdoor toys.  The attic has room for storing items like our Christmas tree.  The laundry room has a large, tw0-door storage cabinet, for keeping items like detergent, paper towels, napkins, etc.  We’ll organize these spaces first, in an effort to free-up storage space and remove clutter.

Organize Living Spaces: Room-by-room

I am a big fan of using a combination of coupons and a grocery price-book to save money when buying groceries.  I am also a big fan of saving money in the kitchen, after those groceries have been purchased.  Here’s how to save money in the kitchen – and minimize those costly trips to the grocery store.

These tips work for our busy family of 5.  There are no professional organizers in this bunch!

In the refrigerator -

Keep things neat and tidy.  It’s easy to forget what you have if you can’t see it.

Prep fruits and vegetables.  We have kids – and kids like convenience foods.  Rather than see our fruits and vegetables spoil, we slice and peel them when we buy them, and the kids eat them up.

Use it up.  Waste not, want not.  When a bottle is almost empty, turn it over, let gravity help you out, and use it up.

At one time – after getting out of debt and before we purchased our new home – we had enough cash in our savings account for six months’ worth of expenses.  We dipped into our savings account when we purchased our home, to purchase new appliances and some furniture.

The time has come to rebuild our savings account balance.  We have created the following plan to increase our savings:

We set a goal.

Our goal is to stash six months’ worth of expenses in our savings account.  We took a look at our budget, removed any obvious unnecessary categories, and then used that amount to calculate our savings goal.