Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Month in Review- July

I am not doing well on posting this past month, but I am also sleeping in my 10th bed in the course of a month- so throw me some slack :)


Month Five has been amazing! We kicked off the month on a 10 day vacation and I finished the month in Denver on a work trip, and squeezed in a great visit with an old friend! 

Financially, Month #5 was pretty amazing.  Nick and I have spent this past month renting out our apartment on AirBnB and have had a total of 11 bookings! I will do a full write-up on our AirBnB experience in the coming week.

Unexpected Costs: 

Our vacation was a little more then anticipated. That whole "Travel Budget" is still something that Nick and I need to work on, or we just need to be more realistic about our travel costs when coming up with a budget. We ended up going over our budget by $607.90. Not our best frugal trip...

Unexpected Income: 
No unexpected income this month! We have a very well laid out budget with our AirBnB income and expenses. We tracked these along with our monthly expenditures letting us track the expenses related to our AirBnB business; hopefully, this will help us later when we are doing our taxes.

July Splurges:
Definitely our vacation, but we also went to a Billy Joel concert! We did pull back on a number of "wants" on the vacation, but all in all we went out to a few fantastic restaurants, drank some great craft beer and we even got to visit an awesome, though expensive, museum in Vermont.


If you are ever in the Burlington area you should check out the Shelburne Museum. I think it may be one of my favorite museums :) It comes with a full steam boat, a barn full of old sleighs, a steam engine, a collection of beautiful artwork and even a toy museum!


However we did choose alot of free activities as well, like hiking Mt. Mansfield in Vermont and hiking White Face Mountain in NY :)

 Funniest Moment: 
When we left our apartment on July 2nd for vacation, we left our apartment ready for our first renter. This meant that Nick and I had to take what we wanted to have/use during and after vacation. We quickly started to describe our car as the Gypsy mobile. We had a Costco size bag of rice, old fashion oats, and enough ground coffee to get us through a month.

As we've moved around over the past month, we have brought our three "must have" grocery items with us from location to location. I keep joking that our priorities must seem totally weird to others, but for Nick and I oats and fruit for breakfast, and rice with beans for lunch is something close to the only routine we've kept over the past month :)

Lessons Learned
My biggest lesson learned this month was to not be so hard on myself, or on Nick. Money is tricky and our emotional attachment to those numbers in our bank account can push me to make irrational emotional decisions.

Let's just say my husband had to "talk me down" after I freaked out that we "only" made a $700 payment to our student loans. Sometimes you need to be brought down to reality and that's when I thank goodness that I have my awesome husband. I needed to be reminded that I should be thankful and excited for any movement forward we make, and not to regret the great moments we have, even when they do cost money.

Any movement forward is better then staying exactly in the same place :)

Total Payment to Debt: $737.75 , on top of our minimum payments for July

Not too shabby for month 5! 

Current Debt: $166,777.53

We started with a total of 35 Student Loans.
We are currently at 34 Student Loans and we need to pay $1,744.71 more in order to reach #33 :)

Student loan #34 has our highest interest rate at 12.5% ! We originally anticipated this taking us a total of 8 months, this being month #2, but I think we may be able to get rid of this one in 4 more months, cutting off 2 months from our initial plan!!

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