Saving for the future – October

Before I get into our savings this past month, I wanted to thank my wife. As we are in the middle of our kitchen makeover, aside from being physically busy with that and everything else that makes up life, I am also very mentally preoccupied with it.

I go to bed thinking about the next step and I wake up thinking about the next step. Last weekend I woke up at 3:30AM thinking about how the heck I’m going to get to the exterior wall header to get new 14/3 down to the 3-way light switch. Sure I could crawl face down into the eave, but trying to pull old wire up through staples with my arms stretched out in front of me with no real leverage was stressing me the hell out.

Luckily, I was able to feed the wire from below in the basement and up to the other 3-way switch. Problem solved, but I was a mess the next day because I only got about 3 hours of sleep. I literally just laid there from 3:30AM until 8AM thinking about that and other things I had to do.

So my long winded reason for all of this is, my mind has had a hard time thinking of anything to write on any of our social media and my wife is really keeping things going on this site. Her mind is always racing with this project too, but she can always think of things to write about. I’m just glad she gave me the idea to write about our savings. I need a softball like this right now.

I haven’t even been posting any updates on our Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, but in my defense, I’ve primarily been running electric lately. While I’m a wire guy for a living and fishing wires is what I love to do, showing some wires sticking out of the wall isn’t a very interesting update.

It had to be done too. All of our kitchen was on one circuit, so sometimes our breaker would trip if anything else came on while we were using the microwave. Now we have 3 dedicated appliance circuits and 2 outlet circuits. It’s like we are living in the future!

Anyway, back to this post. Here is where our savings stands at the beginning of October.

Our savings account is going to start taking a beating as the kitchen progresses, but that is what it is for. We’ve been saving for this for about a year now so that we don’t have to borrow any money. It’s going to be a little tough, but we are hoping to not fall below $20,000 in our savings account. We’ll see how that plays out, as we keep thinking of different little things we want to do through the kitchen project.

We were able to save our planned $500 into our savings account this past month, BUT we had to transfer $500 back out to help cover a $1,119 Lowes bill. It’s not a total loss though. Christy was able to put away an extra $86 and we made $13.62 in interest.

Our vacation fund received the expected $200 and gained and gained $1.09 in interest.

Our emergency fund received the expected $600, an additional $200 and gained $3.50 in interest.

In total for this month, we were able to save $1,586 and earned $18.21 in interest, but had to transfer $500 back to checking for the kitchen makeover.

Aside from just wanting it to be done so we can use and enjoy it, I can’t wait until the kitchen is complete so we can stop spending money.